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This blog is titled the Sullivan Blyth Family Tree but thus far I have ignored the Sullivan bit, concentrating instead on my early life as a Blyth.

However, in 1985 I took on the name and membership of my new husband’s family, and of course my own children are as much Sullivans as Blyths – in some ways more so I often think. For the Sullivan clan seems to be possessed of extremely strong genes: the first time I ever went to a Sullivan family party I was struck by how alike they all are, and my brother-in-law apparently spent his first Sullivan gathering working out who was a blood relative and who wasn’t – and mostly got it right. At one family party my husband was even accosted by his cousin’s young son who thought he was his dad!

And my three offspring, while I can see some likeness to members of my side of the family, are so obviously brothers and sister, and so like many of their Sullivan relations that at times I think they are clones and I just incubated them.

My husband himself was born in Whitechapel (NOT Tower Hamlets) in the London Hospital, a true Cockney whose parents hailed from Bethnal Green and Stepney. All good old Londoners. He spent his first four years in the East End before his family, like many in the area at that time, took up the offer of re-housing in the suburbs. While others migrated to Essex or the South London borders, my in laws opted for Borehamwood and so in November 1955 they took possession of No 27, Grantham Green, the house in which they brought up their children and into which in later years we moved with our own young family.

Although my parents in law had a modest family of two – my husband and his younger sister – this was not typical of the Sullivans, who, at least in earlier generations, took their Irish Catholic heritage seriously. My father-in-law was the eldest of nine children and my husband has 27 first cousins on that side of the family, though none on the maternal side as his mother was an only child.

As a small boy my husband was regularly taken to visit his granddad Thomas Sullivan who at that time lived in Hardinge Street, Stepney. Although as the only grandchild at the time he was, as I can well imagine, petted by his aunts – to this day none of them will believe he can do anything wrong! – on one famous occasion he did fall foul of Grandad Sullivan, whose word was law in the house.

Every Saturday afternoon, the time at which the football results were read out on the radio was sacrosanct: Thomas was checking his pools coupon and total silence was to be maintained. Nothing short of the house burning down could interfere with the process.

One afternoon little Christopher was visiting, and in the middle of the announcements, he came up to the kitchen table at which Grandad was seated, grabbed the pools coupon from his hand and ran away with it. The collective family breath stopped, waiting to see what Grandad would do…. Not his worst, obviously, because Chris survived to adulthood!

Grandad  worked for the Post Office, and was himself one of a family of eight. His father, Joseph Jeremiah Sullivan, whose photograph we have and who looks like my husband in Victorian costume, was at one time believed to have been born in Ireland, but actually it was Jeremiah’s father, John Sullivan, who emigrated from Cork to London in the 1860’s, leaving, we now believe, a family in Ireland and starting a new family in England…