After some research I found that my mother's father was a bigamist, was wounded at Mons, not Ypres, changed his middle name twice, had lied about his age to make himself two years older to join the army, and my uncle, who wanted to discover his father's origins upset his sister so much by what he found out she never spoke to him again.

Uncle Cyril wanted to find living male descendants, who shared his surname. Just before his death I discovered that there were two great grandsons of his uncle living in the US, and although by then he was not using his phone so I could not tell him directly, the information was passed on to him through the family, and after a long and fruitless search he knew that his name would not become extinct.

On my dad's side there were linen weavers, union men agitating for a living wage way back. Just looking at the number of people crammed into one house as listed in each census, each family with a couple of lodgers, shows the way that the 'have nots' spent their lives creating wealth for the 'haves' for generations.