Up a Tree

My last post caused some questions I wanted answers to, and as I began running them down, I came upon a story that appeared to have ties to one of Sharon's ancestors. And I was in for a surprise. My explorations last week led me to Guy Fawkes. If you watch much British TV, or if you remember your world history, or if you've heard of the graphic novel V for Vendetta, which was made into a film in the early 2000s, you've heard of Fawkes and the holiday named for him celebrated in England. If not, you make have seen a Guy Fawkes mask like the one in the picture. I looked up Fawkes many years back and couldn't remember what I'd learned so I looked him up again. Short version: Fawkes was an English Catholic who joined with several other conspirators in the early 1600s to blow up Parliament during a session that would include both chambers and King James I. They hoped to dispatch a majority of two houses and maybe the king and rise up with like-minded Catholics to install

We pretty well know, thanks to events in the last half of the last century, that relationships between Catholics and Protestants have been strained at best in the British Isles. Violence wracked Ireland for ages and though relationships are better, the divisions still exist. Somehow knowing this did not stop my mind from doing a double take while researching one of the members of my side of the family tree. I was rooting around trying to find a story I hadn't told and ran across Sir John Hungerford, knight of the shire for Gloucestershire.  Sir John appears in The History of Parliament online and was involved in some aspects of English history we've mentioned and a few others we'll explore for at least a couple of weeks. Now given the changes I've seen occur in the family tree since beginning this project, I'm not going to definitively claim him, but if he does belong in my past, he would be my 11th great-grandfather.  His appearance in The History  results from his