A Channel Islands Legacy

A view of St Peter Port, Guernsey

So close and yet so far. My cruise ship stopped at Guernsey but my family links were to Jersey. Time to plan a future journey to that other Channel Island. All was not lost, however, as, even though there is a rivalry between the two islands, they have much in common.

The islands are closer to France than they are to England although they are British Crown dependencies. My search for family information online at Jersey Heritage https://www.jerseyheritage.org/collections/archive

brought up family records written in French although the heritage website was in English. I wasn’t sure which language would be spoken. No worries, our driver/tour guide sounded like a London cab driver. 

Given the history in living memory, this made sense. With German occupation eminent, many of the islands’ children were evacuated to Britain. There they would have picked up the language and accents of their hosts. The story of the occupation from the islanders’ point of view was brilliantly depicted in The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. There were tours on offer which followed the episodes in that book but, as much as I enjoyed the story, I chose a more general tour which took in scenery, colourful sights and signs of German occupation.

When building their bunkers, the Nazi forces had no concern for the archaeology of the area and, the sources that I read blamed them for causing irreparable harm to the historical record. I hope that similar harm was not done by them or through other attempts at modernization when I search for traces of my family on Jersey when I finally get there.

My family’s stay was a short one, at least for the living.. My 2 x great grandparents left Dorset sometime in the 1870s, when the Channel Islands were opening up to more people from England. They settled in St Helier for a time and it was there that their daughter, my great grandmother, came to get married. As she and her future husband lived in Birmingham it took me a while to find that information through a newspaper notice as the marriages on the Channel Islands are not included in the entries at the General Register Office for England. 

 Some of the leftovers from the German occupation