‘Grimsby feels like the strongest part of me,’ says Kevin Clifton as his episode of Who Do You Think You Are? opens in the 2023 series. He then jokes about the unlikelihood about any of his family coming from the other side of the world. In fact, it will turn out that both are true!

Kevin was born in 1982 and grew up in Waltham, a village just a few miles from Grimsby. It’s no surprise that dancing came to dominate his life – his parents Keith and Judy Clifton still run a dance academy in the town, and were themselves national and international Latin American dance champions. Keith’s own parents, Eddie and Peggy, were also renowned dancers, Peggy being a world class quickstepper. Kevin’s sister Joanne won the World Ballroom Showdance Championship in 2014 and starred on Strictly Come Dancing from 2014 to 2016, and of course it’s Strictly that brought Kevin fame too, winning the 2018 series with Stacey Dooley, now his fourth wife. Kevin has also done some acting and has a property investment business. Not bad going for the man Bruce Forsyth christened ‘Kevin from Grimsby’.

The show begins with Kevin off to find out what his parents know about their roots, and the story starts to follow Keith’s line back. A crucial turning point is learning that Kevin’s great-great-grandmother Emma Grace Elizabeth Russell was born in Canada – something we can see in the 1911 census at TheGenealogist:

In fact, Keith (who own roots are much nearer to London than Grimsby) had known of a rumour connecting the family to a story about Hudson Bay, and that an unusual name, ‘Matooskie’, had been passed down the family. It’s a long journey for Kevin, across the Atlantic and back through time, but the show will get to the bottom of the rumours, and it’s an incredible tale, so do watch it!

Kevin’s Canadian adventure is certainly captivating, but let’s go back to Grimsby here, and in fact the show doesn’t find time to look at this at all. ‘My grandparents were very Grimsby,’ Kevin says, and mentions that he knew his great-grandfather Jack had been a fisherman, but that’s all. However, we can use the extensive resources at TheGenelogist to quickly set the scene for his roots on his mother’s side.

Kevin’s mum Judy was born Judith Alston, and her father was Raymond Alston. When she was interviewed by the local press after Kevin shot to fame, she said Raymond had run a pub in Grimsby, as well as a hotel and then later a grocery store. If we type his name into TheGenealogist’s Master Search, we can straight away find his death registration index record:

Civil registration records at the site have been carefully interlinked wherever possible, making it easy to follow a pathway through someone’s life. Knowing his name and now his age, we can find out more at the click of a button – the little icon of a mother and child at the bottom – which uses the site’s SmartSearch feature to suggest likely birth records for Raymond. And that gives us this birth index, adding his mother’s maiden name of Purcell to the picture:

We can likewise then use SmartSearch to discover that Raymond’s parents were John Alfred Alston and Rosetta Purcell. Every time so far, there’s Grimsby!

Now that we have the span of Raymond’s life, from 1923 to 2003, we know that there aren’t any decennial census records we can access to gain more details – but luckily for anyone tracing mid-20th century family members, TheGenealogist has transcriptions from the closest record set available of that magnitude, the 1939 Register. Let’s look for Raymond there:

Now we can see that he was already a shop assistant at the age of 16, which clearly set the foundations for his career as a publican and shopkeeper in the future – plus we see his parents. His father Alfred is listed as a ‘net foreman’, which gives us our first connection to Grimsby’s key industry of fishing. Using TheGenealogist’s Map Explorer also enables to set the scene and get a sense of place – for example by viewing Grimsby on old maps from the 1880s to modern times.

Returning to the 1911 census, we can see Alfred Alston – Kevin’s great-grandfather – living on Harold Street and here listed as a ‘fisherman’. Exploring other records at the site also reveals that he was ‘John Alfred Alston’ – which suggests that he was the ‘Jack’ Kevin had heard about. Once again, Grimsby is there in the bones of the family – although in fact Alfred himself was born in Preston, Lancashire, so there’s a new line of enquiry for Kevin to follow some day!

Zooming in on the old maps gives an even better sense of place: Alfred lived on Howard Street in 1911 and with his growing family on Johnson Street in 1939 – and this 1890s Ordnance Survey map shows they were only two streets apart – and of course only a few hundred yards from the sea, where Alfred and no doubt many other relatives made their living.

In Who Do You Think You Are?, it’s the Atlantic Ocean rather than the North Sea of Grimsby that Kevin sets sail across, and you can follow that story with him on Thursday 22 June!