This was the weekend of the Secrets and Lies conference run by the Halstead Trust. I’ve been to a good many of these residential family history conferences over the years (and I do mean years, my first was over forty years ago) and this rated as one of the best. We’d travelled up to Peterborough the previous day and were ensconced in a caravan site half a mile away from the conference venue. Half a mile that is if you were prepared to cross a river and a railway line; it was actually two miles away by road. We were there for everything except bed and breakfast however so weren’t going to miss out.

Having had a quick recce in the morning, we arrived at the venue in the early afternoon to meet many friends. This was our first post-covid residential conference, so this was a first meeting in person for several years for some of us. It was also lovely to meet people who I was used to seeing in a rectangular box on a screen and discover how tall they were! There were also several of our lovely A Few Forgotten Women volunteers present; most appropriate given the conference theme of secrets and lies.

Lectures kicked off with Maggie Gaffney talking about a transportee, followed by Paul Blake illustrating just how the visual image, or our perception of that image, can lie. We were then treated to tales of bigamy and adulterine births in Scotland by Stewart Stevenson. The evening meal followed and Else Churchill rounded off the day with post watershed accounts of the bawdy courts.

Saturday dawned and I was first up, chatting about prostitution. I was glad that both my sessions were early on in the day as my capacity for being alert for a whole day at events like this is clearly waning. There was a choice of talks for Saturday’s lectures, so sadly I had to miss some I’d would have liked to hear. My first choice was Margaret’s ’Auntie Jo’s lost on the Family Tree’, which included the fascinating story of Agnes Beckwith’s life of secrets and lies, alongside a notable swimming career. After a buffet lunch of sandwiches and chips, which struck me as a rather odd but most acceptable combination I went to help Chris, who had been personning my bookstall all day. One of the advantages of in-person talks is that you do tend to sell a few books.

My choices for the afternoon were Alan Moorhouse’s tales of bigamy, Donna Rutherford’s detective story, cracking a coded message on the back of a postcard and Sarah Wise, with an account of her research into those incarcerated under the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act. Then a quick trip back to the caravan to get what passes for glammed up in our world. I was proud to receive a certificate of achievement from the Society of Genealogists. I’d actually been awarded this during Covid but this was the first opportunity for it to be handed over. Then to the food, to be frank, we aren’t a great fan of gala dinner food, preferring hearty platefuls of plainer fare over artfully arranged sprigs of not much surrounded by bits of drizzle. It is often a case of choosing the least worst menu options. This was not too bad by comparison. The soup was tasty, my aubergine something or other and Chris’ chicken something else were acceptable and puddings always go down well. A word about the dining room staff, who were just incredible in their efficiency. The woman in charge was managing them with a series of hand signals that made her look like she was a race-course bookie. She really should be in a top-class restaurant not a motel on a roundabout.

Then Sunday and by this time, I am realising that it takes stamina I am not sure I have to get through these events intact. The first talk by Calista Williams about the staff in Cottage Homes dovetailed well with the premier of my talk on Fallen Women. Judie McCourt then told us about Emma Costello’s life and divorce, including an encounter with a mystery Italian on a sofa. After more sandwiches and chips for lunch, Debbie Kennet treated us to a DNA case study, uncovering a paternity mystery.

Then it was all over. I know from experience just how difficult and exhausting these conferences are to organise and the team did a great job. I don’t know how many crises they were fielding under the surface, I am sure there were some but it didn’t show. I think I have persuaded a few people to come to our conference next year and I have a lot to live up to but I am confident of our excellent programme and beautiful location, so we do it all again then, although I have another bite of the conference cherry in between at the Guild of One-Name Studies conference in April and stand by for more family history next weekend.

Post conference, we arrived back at the van to find that it was three foot further back than we’d left it. Next door but one with huge new-to-them caravan and an automatic Volvo had been trying to move off site to go home. They’d left the motor movers on (which move the van into place a bit like a remote control car). Husband driving leaves engine running and car in drive mode and gets out to turn said motor movers off, as they are acting as a break. He turns them off – car then takes off on its own with the caravan, heading for our van. Wife in the passenger seat tries to steer car away from our van. Guy in nearby camper van tries to push their van away from ours and gets knocked down. At least this is the rather garbled story we came back to. Minor cosmetic damage to the tow hitch of our van and two broken feet where it was pushed back a metre. Site owners had been trying to ring but we had turned phones off in the conference. We were met by very apologetic damage-causers who were clearly still in shock five hours later. We ran checks to ensure we could still wind our legs up (that’s the caravan’s legs – not so sure about our own) and connect the car to the van, which were the concerns. Then to recover from the weekend.