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’m torn on how to approach the idea of luck. I’m the first to admit that I am one of the luckiest people on the planet. To be born into a prosperous American family in 1960 with smart parents is to start life on third base. The odds against my very existence are astronomical.


I’ve always felt that the luckiest people I know had a talent for recognizing circumstances, not of their own making, that were conducive to a favorable outcome and their ability to quickly take advantage of them.

In other words, dumb luck was just that, it required no awareness on the person’s part, whereas “smart” luck involved awareness followed by action before the circumstances changed.

So, was I “lucky” to be born when I was—nothing I had any control over—and that I came of age just as huge databases and computers were advancing to the point where I could use those tools to write “What Works on Wall Street?” Absolutely.

Was I lucky to start my stock market investments near the peak of interest rates which allowed me to spend the majority of my adult life in a falling rate environment? Yup.