Genealogy of Thorold and Marjorie Penn

by Richard Penn

This book is the result of years of research into one family, tracing back the male and female lines; the mothers as well as the fathers. The work was started by Thorold Penn, my father, and carried on by myself for nearly twenty years. You may find an interest in specific people, maybe to help your own research. It will also be relevant if you have an interest in a specific place (see list below), as a piece of social history, a slice through time. None of the people are particularly important, they occupy the middle class in every generation. The book may also be of interest if you are considering research into your own family history; you could create this kind of thing for your own ancestors, or hire a professional to do the same. In some ways, I have been lucky in my choice of ancestors - publicans are one of the few professions recorded in official documents as far back as the seventeenth century, and I have a lot of innkeepers in my tree.
Specific places and families: Bidford-on-Avon, near Stratford, Warwickshire (Penn, Pene, Penne, Shakespeare); The Stag at Red Hill (Penn); Radway and Ratley, near Kineton, Warwickshire (Penn, Sanderson Miller); Minehead, Somerset (Pearse); Swingfield and Dover, Kent (Sayer); Broadwoodwidger and Tavistock, Devon (Bickle, Hunt); Plymouth, Devon (Jarvis, Davies); Whatlington, near Battle, Sussex (Penn); Bedfont, Middlesex (Penn, Pearse); Lambeth (Bailey) and Windsor (Messenger).
Other topics: 16th century mills, inns, wills and inventories. Women in c16 business. The Royal Navy, especially HMS Flying Fish, HMS Zanzibar, Petty Officers and Engine Room Artificers; The Battle of Waterloo, the 6th (Inniskillen) Dragoons and the Union Brigade; The Indian Mutiny, the Bengal Artillery, actions at Mungrowlee and Suagar, Madhya Pradesh, India; The Hull and Barnsley Railway, Kirk Smeaton; Canada Lake Steamers at Kaslo, British Columbia, specifically MS Hosmer and MS Nasookin.
Whether or not you buy the book, if you have any relevant information, I would be happy to hear from you. If you have read Marjorie's book, 'The Little Nurse,' you may also find this one of interest, in a different way.

150 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 16, 2017

About the author

Starting with a degree in Ergonomics, I moved into the High Tech world in the seventies, emerging relatively unscathed twenty years later. I was around when the profession of User Interface Designer had invented itself, and it provided me with a decent living in Canada. I left that business in the late nineties, before the tech bubble burst, going freelance to write custom software for a number of small firms. Now I've retired from all that and moved back to England. I live in the summer on my narrowboat "Delta Vee" (for the uninitiated, that's the rocketry term for a "change in velocity", many narrowboat names refer to slowing down). The winters, I live in a up north, near Hexham. I have two lovely daughters, one a psychologist and the other a veterinary nurse.
Since reading early science fiction as a teenager, especially the books by Robert Heinlein, I have been obsessed by humanity's future as a space-dwelling species. The non-fiction book "A Step Further Out" by Jerry Pournelle revealed the serious challenges to this idea, and got me thinking about ways of overcoming them. Several ideas and years of calculation later, I had a detailed simulation of the colonisation of the Solar System, with named individuals travelling about under the control of a realistic simulation of the motion of the various lumps of rock that fly about up there. Turning the simulation into anything other than a vastly expanded virtual train set was the challenge. This book is an attempt at that. If you spend all your spare moments in a complex imaginary world, you can be considered insane. Unless you share it with some other people, then you are an author.
The big questions people ask when I talk about this world are: why would anyone want to go, and why wouldn't it turn into wild-west chaos. I've found there is no short answer to these questions, and fiction seems like the best way to address them. The "why" question seems so obvious to me I can't assemble arguments to it. The "peace" question is so broad, it's going to take several books for me to answer it to my own satisfaction.