The Lighthouse Remains

FIELD NOTE No. 001

5th November 2025

On names, beginnings and the establishment of Sharpe's Bureau.

There is a lighthouse on the desk.

There has been for some time.

It first appeared on 5 November 2021, when a small genealogical practice called Lighthouse Genealogy opened its doors. The date marked the centenary of the birth of my late grandfather, Ernest Sharpe, whose life had provided the original inspiration for its establishment.

The name seemed right.

Genealogy is navigation of a sort. Research begins somewhere known and proceeds into considerably less certain territory. Records are incomplete. Names change. Identities become confused. Evidence conflicts. Assumptions acquire the appearance of fact simply through repetition.

A reliable point of reference is useful.

So is a lighthouse.

For four years, Lighthouse Genealogy went quietly about its business. Family trees were constructed. Records were found. Archives were visited. Questions were answered.

Other questions produced more questions, which is often the way of these things.

Some were less straightforward. Some began with little more than an uncertainty, a discrepancy, or an old family account which nobody had ever satisfactorily explained.

I had spent fourteen years as a detective with the Metropolitan Police before genealogy became my principal discipline. Inevitably, some old habits followed me across.

Start with what you know.

Establish who everybody is.

Put things in chronological order.

Find the original record.

Ask where the information came from.

Notice the thing that doesn't fit.

And never make the evidence say something simply because it would make for a better story.

That last one matters.

My own family had carried a story for years. There had been a murder.

That was about the extent of it.

Nobody seemed to know precisely who had been murdered, what had happened, or quite how we were connected to it. Somewhere along the way, an event involving real people had become one of those peculiar fragments of family folklore which everybody knows and nobody can explain.

So I went looking.

The trail eventually led to Hitchin in 1919 and Elizabeth Gordon, my great-aunt, who by then was known as Mrs Ridgley. She and her dog, Prince, were killed at the general shop she kept in Nightingale Road, which was also her home. Both had been bludgeoned to death and were found lying close together.

The investigation that followed was a significant episode in the history of rural policing. Hertfordshire Constabulary eventually sought assistance from the Metropolitan Police and Frederick Porter Wensley of Scotland Yard was sent to Hitchin to take charge of the investigation.

Wensley's involvement provided an unexpected personal connection. I had been interested in Wensley and his career long before discovering that he had investigated a murder within my own family.

Sometimes the past has a sense of humour.

But finding Mrs Ridgley did something else.

It demonstrated how much can sit just beyond conventional family-tree research: an unfamiliar name, an unidentified photograph, an uncle who was said to have done something during the war but would never discuss it, someone who simply disappears from the records, a relationship that doesn't quite make sense, or a story still repeated around the family table long after everybody who knew the truth has gone.

Not secrets to be sensationalised.

Questions to be examined.

There is an important difference.

Family accounts occupy an interesting place in genealogical research. They may preserve details which have disappeared from the documentary record, but repetition is not evidence. Memories alter. Stories acquire details. Several people become one person; two events become a single event; places and dates move around.

Occasionally, something survives remarkably intact.

The task is not to decide which version would make the better story. It is to establish what the surviving evidence will support.

That principle applied under Lighthouse Genealogy and it applies equally now.

By 2025, I had become aware that the name Lighthouse Genealogy was also in use elsewhere. To avoid any possibility of confusion, a new name was required.

On 5 November 2025, four years after the original practice was established, Sharpe's Bureau of Ancestral Research & Investigation appeared on the door.

An absurdly long name.

Quite deliberately.

The work continues much as it did before. Family trees are researched and extended. Archives are visited. Documents are examined. Evidence is compared and conclusions are reached only as far as that evidence permits.

There is also room for the questions which arrive without a convenient heading.

A name on the back of a photograph. A discrepancy in an existing family tree. A story which has been repeated for fifty years. A person who ought to be in the records and isn't.

Sometimes there will be an answer.

Sometimes there won't.

Either is preferable to inventing one.

The name changed.

The lighthouse remains.