Actress Lesley Manville CBE is a big hitter of British film and TV, having been nominated as best actress in both the BAFTAs and the Oscars. In recent times she has starred as Princess Margaret in The Crown and had a lead role in Magpie Murders, and in the past she has been in everything from Emmerdale to Mr Turner.

She doesn’t feel she particularly knows her roots, however: ‘Through understanding where I’ve come from, I’m hoping to understand myself more,‘ she says in her episode of Who Do You Think You Are?, the last in the 2023 series (scheduled for 27 July).

Her mother Nora was a glamorous dancer and her father Ronald, variously a bookmaker and taxi driver, loved singing, so her immediate family background certainly fed into her career as an entertainer. But what about further back?

One family photo shows the two immediate generations before her, but Lesley reveals that three of her grandparents died before she was born, and the other when she was only a young child. What might she learn about them and their origins? In her journey for the show, she particularly wants to get to get to the bottom of family rumours surrounding her mum’s side of the family.

We can use online records at TheGenealogist to follow her journeys into the past and open up the family tree. Here we can see Lesley’s own birth was registered in Brighton, and she grew up in nearby Hove.

The site’s clever SmartSearch feature also means we can immediately track down her parents – clicking the little icon of a couple immediately gives us more information about Ronald and Nora (known in the family as Jean), who married in 1941.

Lesley recalls hearing her maternal grandfather, James Arthur Edwards, being described as rather ‘austere’ – Lesley and her sister Diana’s impression is that their grandfather ‘wasn’t a very nice man’. But there’s a complex web of relationships to learn about! Here’s his record from the 1939 Register (compiled to help with creating national identity cards), used in the show and available to Diamond subscribers at TheGenealogist:

James and Harriet were Nora’s parents (she was born in 1923), but despite living in a time when having children out of wedlock was a scandalous choice, it turns out that they never married – and Lesley and her sister Diana’s impression is that their grandfather ‘wasn’t a very nice man’.

By delving deep into Brighton’s local archives, Lesley uncovers a complex story of wartime separation, adultery, and the inaccessibility of divorce, which leads to her grandparents’ unconventional family arrangement. As the records reveal more details of their lives, Lesley is profoundly moved to discover that her grandad comes across in fact as a kind and loving man.

Among those records used in her episode of the show is the 1911 census, readily available at TheGenealogist, which helps us to understand more about James and his circumstances. Here we can see that back before the First World War, he was living in Brighton with his then wife Mabel, with whom he had two children:

It will turn out that both James and Harriet’s previous relationships were complicated, but these two were clearly brought together by love. Watch the show to learn more!

Tracing back her father’s line reveals even more surprises for Lesley as she learns about the Harding line in her family tree – a Louisa Harding married William Manville (Lesley’s great-grandfather), and Lesley ends up setting off to solve what happened to her 3x-great-grandfather Aaron Harding. With no record of his death what happened to him is a mystery.

Here is a record of a marriage licence allegation, showing he was married to Sarah Stacey in Hampshire:

Sadly Sarah died in 1829 (her burial record too is at TheGenealogist). A widower with a large family to feed, Aaron protested poor conditions and pay as an agricultural worker in rural Hampshire in 1830 – a protest that would become known as the Swing Riots and which spread across southern England at the time.

As one of the key figures in the riots, Aaron was arrested and subsequently transported to Australia. We can even find a record of that, revealing that he was sent for life to New South Wales in 1831 on the ship Eleanor:

So Lesley follows Aaron’s trail to the other side of the world to learn about his final fate and ends up discovering family she never knew existed. Follow her journey down under as another great series of WDYTYA comes to a close!