Digging into someone else’s family history may be the same in many ways as digging into your own, but there are some important differences too, especially when there are secrets to uncover. I am a writer and, in this article, I discuss the research for my recent book about an Englishwoman who staged her own death in 1907. After leaving her clothes on a beach in France, Grace Oakeshott journeyed to the far colony of New Zealand to re-invent herself – and to begin a new life with her lover, Dr Walter Reeve. She left behind her husband, Harold Oakeshott, as well as her parents, two sisters and a brother.

When someone wants to disappear completely and takes as much trouble as Grace Oakeshott did to deceive others, then finding them in the records presents challenges.

Her New Zealand descendants were first to disclose the truth about her disappearance and it was with them that my research journey began. They quickly became my key informants. Later, with the help of online birth, death and marriage records, as well as some serendipity, I also managed to trace the families of those Grace had left behind in England. Technically, of course, since the people I wanted to write about were all dead, I knew there were few legal barriers to my project but securing the cooperation of the families involved always felt crucial to me. As a complete stranger, I felt apprehensive at times about approaching family members and I worried about intruding. How much did they know? How would they feel about the things I had to tell them and what would they be able to tell me?

Historians writing about their own families have few such concerns of course – but I was lucky. The various families had different versions of the story – and they felt differently about it, too. It was one thing to be descended from a romantic, runaway couple in New Zealand, but quite another to be related to an abandoned husband or to other family members who had been left behind. Not everyone wanted to talk to me but those who did were unfailingly generous with their time, memories and historical artefacts.

The families provided me with many leads (sometimes the name of a remembered friend, a place, or a significant family event) and their recollections and personal anecdotes brought my story to life. To build a picture of Grace and her associates, I needed to hear the narratives that had been handed down through the generations, to see the family photographs and read their letters – none of which were available to me in the official archives.

But the archives were useful in other ways. Fortunately, unlike most middle-class women of her generation, Grace was active outside family circles and in her public and professional life, she was clearly visible. It is much easier to research an activist who writes reports, gives talks and chairs meetings than one who is confined to her home – however hard she works. Extraordinary as it may seem, after her ‘death’ in 1907, the London Times published Grace’s obituary which contained details of her schooling, employment and voluntary work. I discovered that she had been lucky enough to catch a wave of educational reform that began in the 1870s and her progressively-minded father had sent her, together with her two sisters, to Croydon High School for Girls.

This school had been set up by what was then the Girls’ Public Day School Company (now the Girls’ Day School Trust) which had been founded in 1872, the year Grace was born. The company aimed to provide some of the first affordable day schools for girls and they planned an academic curriculum to match what was on offer in boys’ schools. From her obituary, I also learnt that Grace had attended Newnham College Cambridge and that in 1904 she had set up the first London Trade School for Girls, in waistcoat making, at what was then Borough Polytechnic Institute (now London South Bank University).

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, educational institutions usually kept records, some more efficiently than others, and my enquiries in these places proved fruitful. In the archives of Croydon High School, for example, I found my first photographs of Grace as a young girl. The family had told me that Walter Reeve had been born to missionaries in Arctic Canada and that he had trained as a doctor at Guy’s medical school. So I visited Birmingham University to consult the archives of the Church Missionary Society – and discovered rich pickings since Walter’s father had reported to his missionary masters every year and they in turn had kept copies of all their correspondence with him. The medical school records for Guy’s were less informative but I was able at least to confirm details of Walter’s admission, the courses he took and the names of his tutors.

By now, the clues were coming thick and fast. I had established that Grace was a key member of the Women’s Industrial Council, an organisation committed to improving the lives of working women. To find out more about her activities, I visited archives at the London School of Economics, and also the Trades Union Congress Library, at London Metropolitan University. As well as establishing dates and the precise nature of her work, these records (which included published journals, minutes and reports) provided vital clues about her political commitments. Here I heard her ‘voice’ (as it were) for the first time, as she argued passionately about the need to alleviate poverty or to educate working class girls so they might aspire to a better future.

Official records held at London Metropolitan Archives gave me details of her appointment to the London County Council in 1905 where (most unusually for a married woman) she took up a post as a full-time inspector. Then it was back to the London School of Economics, this time to the Fabian Society records, to trace husband Harold’s activities with the Fellowship of the New Life, the organisation that preceded the Fabians. He was an energetic and enthusiastic ‘New Lifer’ and when I found articles he had written for their journal, full of humour and passion, I began to understand what might have attracted Grace to this man.

As well as helping me to understand the lives of the key characters in my own story, the archives (I consulted over 30 different collections) often provided the names of their close associates, many of whom are far better known and had lived more fully-documented lives. From the Women’s Industrial Council records, I could see that Grace had rubbed shoulders with Beatrice Webb, for example, and from the Fabian Society archives, it was obvious that HG Wells must have been known to both Harold and to his older brother, Joseph. When she was setting up the London Trade Schools for Girls, I discovered that Grace had worked closely with Margaret MacDonald, the wife of Ramsey MacDonald, who would eventually become the country’s first Labour Prime Minister. As I read about their more visible and better known colleagues (many of whom have been the subject of biographies) I glimpsed my characters from time to time, gleaned further details about their interactions and, now and then, came to understand something of the way their contemporaries had regarded them.

By now, although there were gaps, I had gathered a significant amount of material about my characters’ lives in England and it was time to go further afield, in particular to New Zealand. Here, I found archives that were far less extensive. Formal and systematic record keeping (in relation to births, deaths and marriage, for example) only began around the middle of the 19th century and even then was not comprehensive. More useful to me in light of Grace’s story were migration records, including ship passenger lists – and old newspapers. Some of these are only available on microfilm but many are online now and at a website called ‘Papers Past’ (paperspast.natlib.govt.nz), I found a goldmine. In Gisborne, where Walter and Grace (now calling herself Joan) lived for ten years, the local newspaper was The Poverty Bay Herald. In the early 1900s, Gisborne was a small community, a kind of frontier town, and this newspaper was its mouthpiece. Colourful descriptions of local happenings (accidents, court cases, extreme weather events, children’s carnivals) all found their way into the daily newspaper and without it I would have struggled to build any sense of what life in the new country had been like for my escapees.

Perhaps I should explain now that my research was not following a linear path, and that I was not moving logically from one source to another, but scurrying back and forth, like an eager rabbit. Time and again, I had to return to archive collections, to my notes of family interviews, historical school records or old newspapers so that I could check details and eliminate inconsistencies. I had begun writing my book early on and this, too, changed the shape of my activities from time to time, dictating what further material I did or did not need. And to put my findings into their contemporary context, I was by now reading extensively about the reform movements of the fin de siècle period – the advent of the New Woman, for example, ethical socialism, vocational education for girls and the changing nature of Victorian marriage.

I needed to know also about the lives of the evangelical missionaries and about migration, colonial imperialism and medical inventions of the time. All the key people in my story had been active campaigners in one field or another and I wanted to find out what had prompted them to take up a particular cause and what aspirations they had had both for themselves and for others.

Finally, to be sure I understood as far as I could what my characters’ lives had been like I decided I needed to visit some of the more significant locations. Most memorable was a trip I made to the Northwest Territories in Canada where Walter was born. You can google yourself all over the world now but, for me, nothing could have conveyed the remoteness and isolation of the missionary life as comprehensively as a visit to a place that in the 19th century was known as Fort Rae. And as I stood on the cliffs high above the junction of the Mackenzie and Liard Rivers at Fort Simpson, and tried to visualise the little missionary church (now located a little further inland) and the arrival of the indigenous peoples in their canoes, I knew I would be able to write about the scene with more conviction and understanding than if I had stayed rooted to my computer.

Similarly, when I discovered that a newly married Grace and Harold had often sailed around the south coast of England with Henry, Grace’s brother,

I decided I should emulate them. Despite my dislike of all things nautical, I signed up for a day of ‘sailing experience’ – and I won’t ever forget it. I had fondly imagined perching at the back of the boat, notebook in hand, camera at the ready – but eight hours of holding, winding, pulling and ducking left me exhausted. As I trudged wearily home, I reflected that I did at least understand now why in his sailing logs Henry sounds so tetchy at times.

There were other trips too, to the beach in Brittany where as far as I could determine Grace had left her clothes in 1907, to the house in Coulsdon she had shared with Harold after their marriage and to Ranmore Common in Surrey where she walked with Walter and after which they named their house in Havelock North, New Zealand. These ‘field trips’, as I thought of them, invariably prompted observations and reflections that I would otherwise have missed – and just as importantly, they were fun. I am happy to report that the families also seem to have enjoyed their association with me and their involvement in my project. With the publication of my book earlier this year, my research journey has come to an end but it has had some unexpected outcomes. Harold’s granddaughter (descended from his second marriage in 1908) says she now sees him in a completely different light, and the New Zealanders (Joan’s and Walter’s descendants) are now in touch with descendants from Grace’s brother and have enjoyed meeting English relatives they never knew they had.

Some key dates in girls’ education

1868	1869	1870	1871	1872	1874	1878	1893	1904	1948
Taunton Report on secondary education for the middle classes is published in England, noting especially the general deficiency in provision for girls	Girton College for Women founded at Cambridge University	The Education Act sets up locally elected School Boards in England and Wales to provide elementary school places for all working class children	Newnham College is founded in Cambridge	The Girls’ Public Day School Company is established in London	London School of Medicine for Women founded	London University becomes the first to admit women to all its degrees. City & Guilds of London Institute is founded to advance technical education	School leaving age is raised to eleven. London County Council sets up Technical Education Board to support technical and secondary education	The first London Trade School for Girls opens at Borough Polytechnic Institute, specialising in waistcoat making	Cambridge admits women to full university membership but retains power to limit their numbers