The war hero and the prisoner.

Family history: a thread

@hugorifkind’s brilliant show on @TimesRadio is sponsored by @AncestryUK, so they took a look at my family tree.

The genealogist Simon Pearce is a genius.

Last week we looked at the war record of my great-grandfather, Edward John Mildon, serving in Gallipoli, Palestine, Balkans and the Somme, for which he received medals for gallantry from Britain and France.

Today we do the other side of genealogy...
Edward Mildon was my great-great-grandfather.
Here he is in the 1851 census
And then here he is in Exeter court records in 1864: sheepstealing
Here is a local newspaper report about it. He basically said he’d bought the sheep from a man, he then that man had died.

The jury didn’t believe him. He got 12months in prison with hard labour.
For one sheep.
Fast forward 1868 and we are back at court again. This time for “larceny by servant”
Turns out great-great-great grandad wasn’t the best master criminal.
His foolproof plan to steal his boss’s coal didn’t work.
Committing theft while a policeman watches the whole thing also isn’t ideal
Seven years penal service at Portland Convict Establishment is tough
These are photos from around the same tome he was there of prisoners in their uniforms cracking rocks
Great-great-great grandad turns up again in the 1891 census. By this time his wife had died. He was 70, working as a farm labourer and living as a lodger with the Bucknalls
What I learned from this is:
Life in 19th century rural England was tough.
Local newspapers are so, so important.
@AncestryUK is brilliant.
I won’t steal coal from Mr Murdoch.
Listen to me learning this story on @TimesRadio with @hugorifkind from 12.30pm today

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I hate when I learn something new (to me) & stunning about the Jeff Epstein network (h/t MoodyKnowsNada.)

Where to begin?

So our new Secretary of State Anthony Blinken's stepfather, Samuel Pisar, was "longtime lawyer and confidant of...Robert Maxwell," Ghislaine Maxwell's Dad.


"Pisar was one of the last people to speak to Maxwell, by phone, probably an hour before the chairman of Mirror Group Newspapers fell off his luxury yacht the Lady Ghislaine on 5 November, 1991."
https://t.co/DAEgchNyTP


OK, so that's just a coincidence. Moving on, Anthony Blinken "attended the prestigious Dalton School in New York City"...wait, what? https://t.co/DnE6AvHmJg

Dalton School...Dalton School...rings a

Oh that's right.

The dad of the U.S. Attorney General under both George W. Bush & Donald Trump, William Barr, was headmaster of the Dalton School.

Donald Barr was also quite a


I'm not going to even mention that Blinken's stepdad Sam Pisar's name was in Epstein's "black book."

Lots of names in that book. I mean, for example, Cuomo, Trump, Clinton, Prince Andrew, Bill Cosby, Woody Allen - all in that book, and their reputations are spotless.