This family history spans the development of Tyneside from a rural idol to the force it became at the coal face of the Industrial Revolution. Inevitably, the journey to unearth my family genealogy, fuelled chiefly by the compulsion of mere curiosity in the beginning, transformed over time into a personal perspective on the historical canvas of the region. I do not claim that this was in any way a unique experience or something particularly noteworthy to anyone outside my immediate family. However, the accidental discovery of 18th-century gravestones standing upright in my local churchyard, the evocative memoirs of my forefathers that stand as a testament to the rise and decimation of the community at Willington Quay, and the brutal poverty they endured there as a consequence of early heavy industry, I thought might contribute a tiny punctuation in the social history of the area.
My own recollections of times past of the wilderness lying between Howdon and Flatworth that served as my childhood playground, of the solitary route taken by bicycle along Willington Dean through the Burn Closes to work as an apprentice each day, and my long association with the Research Station down Davy Bank; more specifically our shipbuilding heritage learned there, one day manifest in a rather feeble sense of duty to share something of these discoveries spurred by the melancholy revelation that those very footsteps were once shared by generations of ancestors.