An interview with Kim Thompson

Kim Thompson lives in Leeds. She is using the British Library’s online newspaper collection, accessed through FindMyPast.com, to research the history of her family.

I first became interested in researching my family history about 16 years ago. I was curious about my grandparents, who had all died either before I was born or when I was young. I’ve got children of my own, and I wanted to know where I came from, and be able to pass the knowledge on. I signed up with all these genealogy sites and I found some wonderful articles on the British Library website about some of my ancestors. My research now goes back to the early 1600s.

My mother’s paternal grandfather was a big puzzle for a very long time. He’d told a few porkie pies in the 1901 census, so that set me back. I traced every single person with his name, unable to find him. Then I did a DNA test, and learned that he’d changed his identity to that of a dead man: a man he knew, from his hometown. This man used to go drinking in a pub run by my great-grandfather, but he had a gambling problem and committed suicide. Around the same time, my great-grandfather disappeared from his hometown, Norwich. The following year, he turned up in London using this other man’s name and age. I still don’t fully understand all the reasons behind it.

The Library holds the transcript of the trial

After I’d found his identity, I could go back a few more generations, and that’s when I found that his great-grandmother was hanged for murder in 1815. The Library holds the transcript of the trial. Reading it was like being in the courtroom: you could see the whole thing happening and what led up to it.

Her name was Elizabeth Woolterton and she was hanged in 1815, in Ipswich. She was a farmer’s wife. She lost her husband in 1811, and had this farm to run. Her husband had left her a thousand pounds, which was quite a lot of money back then, but by 1814, she’d run out of money. She wasn’t very good at managing things, I think. Her uncle promised her that when he died, he’d leave her his house.

She used to bake him cakes, and a few times, after he ate them, he was unwell. She baked another one and got her son to take it round to his house, but he didn’t want it because he’d been ill the last time he’d eaten one. He gave it to his housekeeper to get rid of, and instead of throwing it away, she gave it to her grandchildren. Her grandson ate too much of the cake, and, unfortunately, he died from it. They did the autopsy and found traces of arsenic. At the trial, they said that she was after her uncle’s money, and she was found guilty of the death.

Each person I’ve found has their own little story

My great-great-grandfather’s sister was a kleptomaniac. She never married. In the 1850s, she was her great-aunt’s companion, and when her great-aunt died, she took a turn for the worse, and got caught stealing a few times. The first time she was given a caution and let off, because her family was quite respectable. The second time, a few years later, she was staying at a rectory, and they went out one day and she helped herself to the entire kitchen. But the vicar’s son became suspicious and followed her. She’d stashed it all in a cabbage patch. He confronted her, and she lay down in the cabbage patch, saying, ‘Oh, I don’t feel too well.’ She got six months for that. I haven’t found anything more about her; I think she might have reformed.

It did get to a point where every ancestor was worse than the one before. I’d like to find some nice pipe-and-slippers, in-bed-by-nine-o’clock-type ancestors. I was saying to someone recently, it’s a surprise that I’ve turned out half as normal as I have. Each person I’ve found has their own little story. My great-grandfather, the one who left his wife behind, had two girlfriends in the early 1900s, and one of them became my great-grandmother. She worked at Bryant and May at the time of the matchgirls’ strike. While she was struggling in the East End of London, making match boxes, her father’s second cousin was having tea with Queen Victoria, because he became the Mayor of London.

History was my favourite lesson as a child

It’s about finding out who you are, the people you’ve come from. My children think I've got an ancestor for every occasion. I’ve discovered that on my dad’s side, there was an astronomer involved in the moon landing in 1969. He was the first director of the Parkes Observatory in Australia. So – moon landing: I’ve got an ancestor for that. The Great Fire of London – I tell them, your eighth great-grandfather’s cousin was Dean of St Paul’s. He became archbishop and crowned James II. Sometimes I think they just shake their heads.

History was my favourite lesson as a child. I was probably quite inquisitive when I was younger. Going back to the age of seven or eight, when we got a newspaper, I’d turn to the middle and look at the births, marriages and deaths, to see if I knew anyone that had been born or got married or anyone on the street that might have died.

I always recommend the Library to new researchers

I wouldn’t have found out half as much if I hadn’t come across the British Library website. Sometimes making a discovery is as simple as just typing in a name. I always recommend the Library to new researchers and anyone who’s interested in the past.

As told to Lucy Peters

The UEFA Women's EURO 2025 kicks off in Switzerland today. In celebration, Library PhD student Cameron Huggett explores the important contributions made by women fans to football culture over the last 50 years, as showcased in our current Voice of the Fans exhibition.

© Alexandra Francis (left) and Filipa Namorado (right), Forward Play! Photo Tracey Welch

In the last few decades, women’s football has gone from strength to strength. Attendance records are regularly being broken, whilst domestic and international matches are enjoying increased media coverage. Of course, this was not always the case. Between 1921 and 1970, the Football Association banned women from playing the sport on affiliated grounds. However, this did not stop women during that time from taking an interest in the game as players and spectators.

Getting women’s voices heard

Voice of the Fans is an exhibition co-produced by us and Leeds Libraries exploring the different ways football fans have expressed themselves and stood up for their communities, values and beliefs from the 1960s to the present day – primarily through the medium of fanzines. These DIY publications were created by supporters, for supporters, and provided an ‘alternative voice’ to the output of clubs, the popular press or the sport’s governing bodies.

Voice of the Fans exhibition. Photo by Tracey Welch

Whilst football fanzines were a male-dominated medium in the years following their inception, women fans still found ways to make their voices heard. Notably, pioneering publications like Born Kicking and Against the Tide challenged the ‘masculine’ world of football fandom by calling out sexism and misogyny at matches, and within the fanzines themselves, whilst also providing a space for women supporters to build a community of their own.

Women also took an active role as contributors to club-based fanzines and the broader alternative press during the 1990s. For instance, writer Andrea Hetherington covered grassroots women’s football in Leeds Other Paper, whilst Anna Tuersley edited the Swindon Town fanzine The 69er. Since the turn of the millennium, fans have been able to combine digital creativity with more traditional print mediums to express their fandom and identities in new ways. Projects such as Girlfans have provided visibility to women supporters of men’s professional clubs in the English and Scottish league systems, whilst SEASON zine has redefined the boundaries of ‘football culture’, blending themes including sport, feminism and fashion.

© Jacqui McAssey @girlfanszine

Online expression and activism

Online platforms have increasingly become the primary medium for fan-made content. These platforms have served to increase opportunities for expression and activism amongst supporters who have previously been underrepresented within fan media, including women, the LGBTQ+ community and people of colour. Within Voice of the Fans, you’ll find video screens displaying webpages captured by the UK Web Archive, including from the campaigns Her Game Too, against sexism in football, and On the Ball, which advocates for the availability of period products in stadiums.Although more ephemeral than their print counterparts, archived sites such as these ensure that evidence of digital fan activism is preserved for future generations.

The women’s game

Also included within Voice of the Fans are objects that relate to the women’s game specifically. Before the emergence of a significant fanzine movement, the Women’s Football Association, founded in 1969, produced their own newsletter to keep members updated. By the 1990s, fan-made publications had begun to be produced that reflected the culture of the game as they saw it. These included Kick Off, the first fanzine dedicated to women’s football in Scotland. In more recent years, the offering has only expanded with publications like The Women’s Game photo-zine capturing the imagery and culture of Lionesses’ fandom during the 2019 World Cup.

Taken together, these objects paint a picture of the activism, diversity and inclusivity of women’s football in the face of cultural and institutional barriers.  

You can see the Voice of the Fans exhibition at Leeds Central Library until 10 August. Find out more 

Independent researcher Bennett Bacon used the British Library to make an extraordinary discovery. Examining marks found on cave paintings from the Ice Age, he found what seemed to be a proto-writing system, dating 20,000 years earlier than any other writing ever identified. Bacon collaborated with academics to research and write a paper about his findings. 

There are absolutely millions of signs and marks from the Ice Age, and there have been various explanations of them. Some people think they're magical. This project started when I was looking at a painting of an aurochs with four black dots from the Lascaux Cave, and wondering what the dots meant. I noticed that all of the aurochs in the paintings have four dots, and I decided they might be numbers, relating to a lunar calendar. I put the calendar together in about three to four weeks, then contacted a calendar expert: Dr Tony Freeth at University College London. 

A cave painting of an aurochs with four dots on its body, on the wall of Lascaux Cave (Dordogne, France), created around 21,500 years ago. Credit: JoJan

You have to find a pattern in nature

Four dots appear alongside each auroch and three with each fish. Interval analysis is the only logical way to work it out. The interval between a fish, with three, and an aurochs, with four, is one. The interval between an aurochs, and red deer, who normally have six, is two. You have to find a pattern in nature that matches that pattern. You lay out modern mating intervals and it's a perfect match, across 32 different species. 

Tony said, ‘We need a lot more evidence.’ After a couple years’ more research, we took our theory to Paul Pettitt, an archaeology professor at Durham. He offered to give us all the help we needed, and involved his colleague Professor Robert Kentridge, too. 

Each one of the lines represents a month

The Upper Paleolithic artefacts are engraved pieces of slate or rock. They are local to the cave where they are found, and it appears that they record information about that cave. The writing system is like this: each one of the lines represents a month, four lunar cycles. The calendar starts when the snow melts and the grass comes back on the mountainsides and the world comes alive. It's spring. 

Bacon's notebook

You can show that the animal, chamois, is in the south-east in month one. In month two, it gives birth. In month three, it's leaving the cave. 

A sign can go in any one of these positions, but depending where it is, its value is altered. So if we add a sign ‘Y’ in position six, it simply means that an animal, let’s say salmon, gives birth in the sixth month after the start of spring. It's a combination of mathematics, science and metaphor. ‘Y’ means that one animal splits and becomes two animals.

The person who has made this writes it in month two of this year, but it’s about month two of next year. The idea is, ‘Let's be here, because the chamois will be there. They will have given birth to young. The herds are really vulnerable.’ So the group can track the young herds. 

Numerosity is an innate human quality

It's like a city guide. Groups go to this cave and discover that, for example, in month seven, the reindeer are migrating, the fish are contra-migrating, the cave is a spawning ground for trout or salmon. So it was a really incredibly useful piece of information, especially when winter was coming. We thought advanced number systems such as a calendar might only belong to urban societies. In fact, numerosity appears to be an innate human quality, provided you have a sufficient mass of individuals. 

Survival is about getting food so that you can eat, but it’s also the ability, in a hostile environment, to communicate and pool the resources of the group. You need systems for doing that. We think the cave paintings are one of those systems. You make paintings, in a sense, for everyone. You can't survive as a little group on your own, but if all of you work together, communicating, sharing tools, sharing technology, you increase your chances. We think that these writing systems allowed that to happen.

Most human groups went extinct: Neandertals; Denisovans. We're the only ones that made it, out of maybe three dozen groups, possibly because of our communication skills, and the ability to use more sophisticated language, and conceive of the world in an abstract way. 

These people are very easy to connect with

It’s extraordinary how close these people from 20,000 years ago are to humans today. They have personal artefacts – you'd call them jewellery – in which there are marks engraved. One of the things they engraved, most frequently, is the fact that they had a child. They often give the time of birth when that child is born, but they may also indicate the sex of that child. These people are very easy to connect with and I think that's the real value of the work.

I've never been to the caves themselves. I will often look at 2,000 images in a day. I need to process vast amounts, which is why I come here to the Library, and I do a lot of the work on the internet as well. We look at every example of something that we can find, so that we're not making hypotheses based on small amounts of data. 

A library preserves the past

The collection at the Library is very comprehensive, containing older books that are very difficult to find. Some of these caves have degraded, so the early photographs are very useful. A lot of the objects have been lost, so the only record is in an old book. It’s a blissful place to work. The staff are really good. 

I think this paper probably wouldn't have happened without the Library. I was here yesterday, inspecting a book which I could only access here. It's a really good book but it's from 1920. A library preserves the past. It’s the place where the things that are dead still exist.  The internet is wonderful, but a good library does things that the internet can’t.

As told to Lucy Peters