About
"We are what we have been" Penelope Lively
On this site I shall attempt to bring together what I have found out about our two families. For privacy reasons, living members of the families will be left out of this history - suffice to say that Dearman is the male side of this particular family tree and Mollett the female. On reflection I have also decided to leave out the previous generation for now, with the exception of my father, as they seem a little too close somehow. So from my grandparents back - and, as I now have grandchildren of my own, this is four generations back from the latest Dearman generation.
In the spirit of this dualism, the photograph at the head of this page, taken in France, represents to my mind the separate strands that make up any family history the connections between them and the others hovering out there on the fringes - but all of them individual. I suppose the picture does not show those trees joining, which of course a family tree does - an individual is a merger of lots of different strands, but from a website point of view the separation is appropriate I hope. Images of trees will be found throughout the site - they are a kind of, not at all original, visual metaphor for the topic, and besides I love trees.
The surnames in the boxes at the top and bottom of the pages, are those provided by the last two generations - back to the writer’s generation of grandparents. Obviously there are many more surnames as one goes further back, and there is an index page to them all. Hopefully through a series of links one particular line will be easily traced back. I shall be concentrating on the direct lines, but every now and then there may be one of those detours to a particularly interesting sibling.
And last but not least I must acknowledge the assistance I have received along the way from the community of family history researchers in general, and the distantly, and not so distantly related individuals I have discovered along the way. It has been an absolute joy to expand the family in this way. Their specific contributions will be acknowledged in the appropriate places.
Really last - thanks to Wix for their wonderful software which makes it so easy and so much fun to create a website. I hope that eventually - maybe in a year's time - I shall have transferred everything over to this new format.
Our families are not famous - mostly these are ordinary people leading ordinary lives, but every now and then there is a kind of fame, a scandal, a tragedy ... I suspect every family has the same kind of pattern. And if there is one thing that this obsession (for obsession it sort of is) with family history has taught me, it is that we are all unique and we all have something special and tantalising about our lives. Perhaps the worst thing about dying is the fear of being forgotten. This website is an attempt to remember these people, and to honour their lives.
Our two families are from England’s south east, Wales and Ireland, with a touch of Sweden, maybe early America and Australia and I shall try to give a little bit of background on the places we inhabited along the way. It will never be finished of course, but the pleasure is in the journeying and I hope you will enjoy the journey too.
The journey has found me asking more questions than answering them, for, inevitably, what we can find out is tantalisingly little, and often consists of the barest of facts. But those facts can lead to fascinating speculation as to why, when, how? If you have any of the answers do let us know by sending an email. Although every line, sooner or later comes to a dead end.
"History is a novel that has been lived."
E & J de Goncourt
We have very few photographs of our ancestors and so when it came to writing their stories I was often frustrated. To get over this frustration I searched the web for paintings, and drawings of people who resembled how my ancestors appeared to me in my head. Occasionally I began with no pictures, chose a representation and then discovered an actual photograph. It has pleased me that often the actual person did indeed resemble their photograph. I have also tried to make the stories more interesting by illustrating them with paintings, drawings and illustrations, sometimes photographs of the places they lived in and the society they lived in. It gave me a new appreciation of portraiture and also taught me so much more about the history of their times.