About Phelps Ancestry

My passion for family history began when I moved to Leeds with my family in 1988. My father, Jack Phelps, who had never told us about the family up until that time, raced up to his study and started typing out a script about the Kitson family of Leeds. Shortly after arriving in West Yorkshire, we were invited to a lunch to celebrate the 150th Anniversary of the Founding of the Airedale Works. Our host was Edwin Kitson-Clark whose knowledge of the history of railways was legendary. He once gave a talk at Leeds University which had the figure of ‘Lion’, the most famous Airedale engine, chuffing across one of the slides in his Powerpoint presentation. I subsequently went to the West Yorkshire Archives at Wakefield and found a mass of information about the family.

During my time in Yorkshire I worked as an archaeologist and specialist in Osteology at the University of Bradford so was more used to writing about this than about family history. However, retirement has provided the time and opportunity to revisit the subject.

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