Today is the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, one of Lincolnshire's most famous sons.
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The statue outside Lincoln Cathedral

When I was a little girl we would go and explore the vast and ruinous Bayons Manor at Tealby, ancestral home of the Tennysons, Tennyson-Turners and Tennyson-D'eyncourts. It was an amazing place - nineteenth century gothic romance at its most gothic and romantic. It was there that my father told me how his grandfather would tell him that we were related to the Tennysons and that wonderful house and the famous poet were part of our inheritance.

Sadly, so far as I can tell (and my family researches have been pretty thorough) there is not a shred of truth in this assertion. Yes, at somewhere around the same time the Turners who were kinsfolk to the Tennysons and the Turners who were my ancestors were both living in and around Alford at the start of the nineteenth century: both families were incomers and all the evidence suggests wholly unrelated to each other.

Nonetheless, I still retain a certain affection for 'Uncle Alf' and his poems and can recite great chunks. The Penguin book of his selected poems in the Swallow Bookworms' book of the month, and I gather that some members may be invited to talk about them on Radio Lincolnshire - generally we all go bashful and Veronica finds herself nominated for things like this.

Possibly one should never actually try to find out the truth behind these family legends - the truth tends to be so much less romantic than the fiction - but I really don't think we are related to this particular great poet. However . . .

Great-great-great-great-grandmother, Mrs. Thomas Turner, was born Hannah Byron in a little village in Nottighamshire not twenty miles from Newstead Abbey, ancestral home of the great poet . . . and the name Byron meant so much in the family that it has been in regular use as a christian name to the present day. Now, I wonder . . .