Welcome to Writing Family History
I’m Alison and my fascination with family history began with my seafaring ancestors, the Dupens of Hayle in Cornwall. I started following them around the world, to Australia, China and India, and before I knew it I was writing a book. A Cornish Cargo was published in 2020 and since then I’ve been working on a number of other projects. In November 2024 I brought out my new book, Another Song at Sunset, about my Scottish grandmother and her friendship with the novelist Lewis Grassic Gibbon. I am passionate about the importance of ordinary people’s lives to our understanding of history. People sometimes tell me I’m lucky to have such interesting ancestors, but I believe everyone has intriguing family stories to tell.
About me
I started off as a linguist who wanted to travel the world, and I was lucky enough to spend ten years working in countries as diverse as French Canada and the Pacific island nation of Vanuatu. I returned to the UK to work in educational publishing and then moved into the charitable sector. I am still a trustee of a charity that supports refugees and asylum seekers.
In 2015 I changed direction once more, and graduated from the University of East Anglia with an MA in Biography and Creative Nonfiction. I followed this up with a PhD at Oxford Brookes, exploring the permeable boundaries between fiction and nonfiction. I am a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and I wrote about my experience of becoming a published historian for the journal Life Writing.
I still love to travel and have had two pieces published by the magazine Hinterland, one about Patagonia (where my profile picture was taken) and the other about Vanuatu and the climate emergency.
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If you choose to follow my blog/newsletter, and I hope you do, you’ll get regular updates about my latest discoveries and a few hints and tips about what I’ve learned from using my family archive alongside the official archives to make sense of the past.
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