THE BUREAU

Sharpe's Bureau of Ancestral Research & Investigation is an independent genealogical practice founded and run by Ben Sharpe in Newport Pagnell, England.

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The Bureau began life on 5 November 2021 as Lighthouse Genealogy, the date chosen to mark the centenary of the birth of my late grandfather, Ernest Sharpe. He was my original inspiration for becoming a genealogist, and the lighthouse was chosen as a symbol of guidance through the sometimes uncertain waters of family-history research. When Lighthouse Genealogy became Sharpe's Bureau four years later, the name changed. The lighthouse remained.

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The investigative character of The Bureau has similarly personal origins. For years, an old story had survived within my own family: there had been a murder. Little else seemed to be known and what had once been fact had gradually become little more than family rumour. My research eventually established that the story concerned the murder of Mrs Ridgley at Hitchin in 1919, a remarkable case in the history of British policing which was eventually investigated by Metropolitan Police detective Frederick Porter Wensley.

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That discovery demonstrated rather neatly what continues to interest me about genealogy. Behind a name, a half-remembered account or a story passed quietly through generations there may be something which can still be established from the surviving evidence.

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Before becoming a genealogist, I spent fourteen years as a Metropolitan Police detective. The two disciplines are certainly not the same, but there are familiar instincts: establish what is known, construct the chronology, identify what is missing, examine the evidence, test assumptions and know the difference between what can be proved and what can merely be suspected.

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That distinction matters. I have the utmost respect for genealogy as both a field of study and a craft. Evidence, provenance and context are fundamental to the work of The Bureau. A conclusion should be capable of explaining not only what we believe happened, but how we know.

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The same respect extends to the people being researched. They were living human beings rather than names in a database, and their lives deserve to be understood within the circumstances and times in which they were lived. The Bureau does not exist to romanticise the past, nor to judge it by the standards of the present. The aim is to establish what the evidence supports and tell it with accuracy, context and dignity.

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Some enquiries concern straightforward ancestry. Others begin with a discrepancy, an unidentified person, an unexplained event or a family account which has survived long after its origins have been forgotten. Whatever the matter, the principle remains the same.

Follow the evidence and find out what happened.