Background to La Diaspora Continua

I created this blog sometime ago with the intention of using it to post articles about my family history which wouldn't really fit into the format and/or scope of my other blogs Photo-Sleuth, Grandpa's War and The South Derbyshire Graveyard Rabbit. Well, I've done a lot of work on Photo-Sleuth and almost none on the others in the last year or two, while this blog totally fell off the radar. However, there are several topics in the various Geneablogger Carnivals and other events which would be far better suited to La Diaspora Continua, and using this blog may well get me stimulated to write articles about my own ongoing family history research on a more frequent basis.

A little background to the name of this blog is perhaps in order. As I have described in an article entitled Connecting the Diaspora on the footnoteMaven's blog Shades of the Departed it was an expression that my father coined - well perhaps it didn't exactly originate with him - to explain the impending departure of his children and grandchildren from the land of our birth. He wasn't happy to see us leave, but of course he comprehended its inevitability, and the fact that it continued the pattern set by him and various ancestors. He emigrated to what was then Southern Rhodesia from Derbyshire, England in 1952, while my mother arrived in 1960 from Amsterdam. His father, after being born in Chicago during a brief attempt by his parents to settle in the United States, had emigrated to Canada prior to the Great War, but returned to Derbyshire in 1921.

My Payne family were farming and coal mining in rural South Derbyshire back as far as the late 17th Century, with brief forays into the nearby counties of Staffordshire, Warwickshire, Leicestershire and Lancashire. Other ancestral branches came from Nottinghamshire, Norfolk and Yorkshire. On my mother's side, the main branches originate from Friesland (Leeuwarden, Dokkum, Woudsend), Utrecht (Loosdrecht) and Den Haag ('s Gravenhage). Eventually, I hope to document as many of these branches as possible, and perhaps some of my wife Gill's family too. They are just as interesting, originating from England, Scotland and the Lebanon, and with some branches being traceable back to the time of the Conquest. I hope family members and other researchers alike will enjoy reading this material, and I look forward to hearing from some of you. Please feel free to post comments to articles or contact me privately by email. Your input will be most welcome.