One of the first things I ever registered about my family history, because my mum was so proud of it, was that her great grandfather worked on the construction of the Settle and Carlisle railway and that her grandfather, William Read, was born at Settle. We were reminded of it on every train trip south to Leicester, in the days when there was still a Glasgow-Nottingham service.

Because she left me such a detailed account of the family and their names I just checked these against the censuses and the registry index on FreeBMD and they all checked out OK so I didn't get any birth certificates for the family. But recently I picked up "The Railway Navvies" by Terry Coleman again - we've had it for many years, my mother must have bought it - and started re-reading it and this provided the incentive to find out a bit more about gt-gt-grandfather Charles. Family tradition says he worked on the construction of St Pancras Station in London (1865), then on the Ampthill Tunnel.

I doubt I'll find any documentary evidence to support the St. Pancras tradition but as he married Lucy Lowe at Ampthill in 1868, the marriage certificate should show his trade and place of residence. Their eldest son was born about a year later at Ampthill, then in 1870 they had a daughter, Elizabeth, who was born at Ratford in Nottinghamshire. Then in 1873, my great-grandfather was born at Settle. The other seven brothers and sisters were born in Northamptonshire and in 1881 Charles appears to have left navvying to work as a labourer in an ironworks.

I think I'll get Charles' marriage certificate and the birth certificates of his four elder children to try and trace his career. I've started off by getting William's : sent for it a week ago, and it arrived today. Nothing more specific than "Settle" for place of birth but Charles' occupation is "Platelayer", so it looks like he laid the track, rather than actually built the railway. It'll be interesting to see what he was doing in Notts and at Ampthill.

I may have chosen a bad moment to start sending for certificates, since it appears that the BBC are showing a new series of their celebrity genealogical programme. This will probably bring the record offices to a halt again. Still, it may be possibly to tie in an event in the Heritage Centre and capitalise on the publicity.