The Descent Of The Ancient Widdrington Family Of Northumberland
Australian History Social History British History Collectible Reference Family History Genealogy Medieval History
The Descent of the Ancient Widdrington Family of Northumberland is the only modern, fully-illustrated reference that traces every branch of one of England’s most turbulent Border clans from their Norman roots to the present day. Malcolm John McGann spent decades combing Northumberland parish registers, Scottish charter rolls, estate ledgers and private correspondence to reconstruct a pedigree that royal heralds had given up as lost. The result is a 2013 hardcover that doubles as a scholarly genealogy and a spell-reading social history: you get the family’s medieval castle at Widdrington, their Civil-war exploits, their forced exile after the 1715 Rising, and the quiet Australian diaspora that still carries the name. Collectors prize the book because it is printed on archival paper, case-bound in navy cloth, and loaded with maps, portraits, floor-plans and colour photographs of artefacts never previously published.
For anyone chasing Northumberland or Border Reiver ancestry, the volume is a ready-made roadmap. Each generation is numbered, sourced and cross-referenced to extant wills, tombstone transcripts, and surviving chancery suits, so you can verify (or demolish) family legends without leaving home. McGann also supplies contact lists for present-day Widdrington DNA projects and the locations of unpublished deed boxes in Alnwick and Durham record offices—information that normally takes years to ferret out. Because the print-run was small and most copies went straight into society libraries, this clean, tight, unmarked example is already scarce on the secondary market.
Beyond pure genealogy, the book is a window into 800 years of English and Australian social change. You will read how the family financed early coal pits at Widdrington Colliery, married into the Percys and the Swinburnes, and eventually sailed to Victoria during the 1850s gold-rush where they became pastoralists and parliamentarians. McGann balances grand historical events with everyday detail—wedding settlements, household inventories, even the price of a good hawk in 1487—so historians, novelists and re-enactors can mine it for authentic colour. The 2013 publication date means the text is recent enough to reflect modern scholarship, yet old enough to have acquired collector cachet, especially in the hardcover format that libraries rarely release.
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