Preface and Acknowledgements

Summary

This book has been adapted from a Ph.D. thesis which I completed in 2005. I was not originally trained as a historian but as a linguist, and I developed an interest in local history through an attempt to research my own genealogy, beginning in the mid-1990s. I am a Guernseywoman born and bred. Both my parents were born in Guernsey. Both my grandfathers were born in Guernsey, and, although I knew that my grandmothers came from elsewhere, I firmly expected, when I started my research, that I would unearth long taproots of local descent anchoring at least part of my family to insular soil. I was astonished to discover, however, that the earliest of my Guernsey-based antecedents had arrived in the Island no earlier than 1828, and that my maternal ancestors were ultimately all French and paternal ancestors all English. I had no ‘native’ blood at all. Just French and English migrants whose arrivals in Guernsey were interspersed throughout the nineteenth century.

I was curious to find out who these people were and why they had come to the Island. As a means of securing the time and resources to look into these matters systematically, I decided in the autumn of 2000 to submit a Ph.D. research proposal to Professor (then Doctor) Keith Snell of Leicester University. This was not done without diffidence, since I had not studied history beyond ‘O’ level and had been away from academia for more than a decade and a half. To my delight, Professor Snell showed considerable enthusiasm for my project and, even more surprising, belief in my abilities to carry it out.

On beginning my research, I was soon struck by the parallels between nineteenth-century developments and those we are witnessing in our own time. Twenty-first-century civil registers are not unlike Victorian civil registers: bristling with names new to the Island. Guernsey today is more cosmopolitan than ever before. What further changes can we anticipate as the Island becomes increasingly integrated, economically and ethnically, into the wider global scene? Our political autonomy remains, but what about our cultural identity? It was in search of perspectives on current conundrums as well as a wish to understand the past that I pursued my research over the next few years.