In 1858 in the little village of North Wingfield in Derbyshire a coal miner, George Knighton married young Anne Mottershaw, the cordwainer, or shoemaker’s daughter. They moved into the cordwainers cottage with her dad, Richard and her brother Joseph. With the arrival of daughters Sarah, Elizabeth and Mary-Ann, George and Anne moved out of the family home, turned their backs on coal mining and took a passage to the excitement of the gold rush in Victoria, Australia. They never looked back, leaving the Mottershaws to continue making shoes and renting the Cordwainers cottage from the church for another hundred years.

The Cordwainers cottage today

Then, there was no building between the Cordwainers cottage and the church – St Lawrence. Now, there are ten times more houses in the village and the church can’t be seen from Cordwainers cottage.

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St Lawrence church looks not to have changed much since it was mentioned in the Doomsday book. The octave of bells don’t see much action now, and the clock has sadly been electrified, although the bells still chimed the quarter hour as we paid respects to buried Mottershaw ancestors in the grave yard. Inside the church the stained glass windows span a couple of hundred years in changing decorative taste. And the congregation sit in the ancient boxed family pews to accompaniment of drum kit and electric guitar for the morning service, the creaky grand old pipe organ for the evening service.

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This pilgrimage happened when a chance phone call from Melbourne to the North Wingfield post office connected us with a local historian Alan, who kindly collated information and introduced us to a third cousin Gordon Mottershaw, descended from Anne Mottershaw’s brother. As it happens, Gordon is a lovely bloke who speaks with a delightful Derbyshire lilt, but he is interested in collecting immaculate old motor bikes and I am interested in collecting immaculate new trombones, so we don’t have a fantastic amount in common except great great grandparents. Which brings us to uncle Bob’s theory of universal interconnectedness. In looking at family trees or charts of descent from ancestors, little thought is given to the vast tangled intermarried web of siblings of the forebears (four bears?). Meaning that after about twenty generations of getting on with life we are probably all somehow related. Can you spot the third cousins?