It's the ordinary ones who are the most interesting I find.

I would have said there was nothing unusual about my family but we've got rumoured suicide pacts between two brothers, mental health incarcerations, tenuous links to local celebrities and some of the saddest lives you could imagine.

One person, my great great great grandmother, had 9 children, of whom only 3 made it past their 16th birthdays, and 3 died before they were 4. She developed epilepsy and spent the last 12 years of her life in the local Asylum - a building that still existed in the 1970s when I visited it, not knowing my ancestor had died there. It's not a great deal unlike a Victorian prison, with single rooms off several corridors, little or no privacy and fewer comforts.

LTS