Parked here are a few paintings where a genealogical/historical theme has crept in. Hard to keep my two professions separate sometimes.  This part of the website is under construction. More images will be added shortly. If you looked at the Boswells in my tree, you'd find more than a few bakers, tailors, and churchwardens.  Good solid, dependable citizens.  Salt of the earth (well, great.granddad  found a home in Coldbath Fields Prison for a few years, but he's the exception). No sign of the gypsy ancestor that my grandmother said was there, curse story and all. Yet Boswell was slang for gypsy.  Boswells were gypsy kings.  Have been shaking the branches of the family tree for awhile now, and he hasn't fallen out yet.  But you never know...

Many of my ancestors were in Southwark, the Tower Hamlets, Bermondsey, and Rotherhithe, all now part of greater London, but in the 19th century wretchedly poor areas. I have one ancestor who has always intrigued me.  Called 'the Wanderer' by his sister, he grew up on the banks of the Thames watching the ships come and go.  His way out was an East India Company regiment embarking for India in 1853, followed by a war in Argentina. By 1862 he is in the American South, fighting with various Confederate Army and Navy units  during the Civil War. In 1864,  he writes of the horrors he has seen there.  Captured by Union soldiers and briefly imprisoned,  his health bad, and broke he writes  that he is going to Boston to try to work a passage home. He isn't heard from again.  This painting comes out of that history.