Jeremy Hardy's family tree

The comedian Jeremy Hardy researched his family tree and found a gap between the facts and his grandmother's tales of grandeur. The reality was far more captivating
The comedian Jeremy Hardy. Photograph: Sarah Lee

My maternal grandmother had what might be described in a school report as a lively imagination. She told us that she was a direct descendant of ­Sir ­Christopher Wren. I fully accepted this and felt very much more special than other tourists when taken to St Paul's ­cathedral as a small child. But that wasn't all. Grandma also told us that her father was a royal bodyguard; that his father had been cheated out of his inheritance to a large country estate in Sevenoaks; and that her other grand­father was head gardener at the Duke of Norfolk's estate at Arundel, or a Welsh coalminer, depending on her mood. The thing that interests me most about family history is the gap between the things we think we know about our families and the realities.

The Sevenoaks tale eventually became the basis for a short story I wrote for Radio 4 in 2007. I insisted to myself that the main character wasn't based on me, and that his grandmother wasn't based on mine – I was being as self-deceiving as his or my grandma. But having written the story, it was on my mind that I should look into some of her claims. I didn't get round to it immediately.

Later that year, I was asked by a publisher if I had any ideas for a book. I was still pleased with my literary ­efforts of a few months earlier, so I ­suggested a book of short stories, but it seems people don't buy books of short stories any more. But I couldn't shake off my fixation with the theme of my short story. It became apparent that I was going to try to trace my origins and write a book about that.

My starting point was Grandma. In common with many people who have experienced great disappointment in life, she wasn't a liar; she just wasn't that fond of reality. She reinvented herself as a grander figure than she was. She had, for six years, enjoyed a colonial life in Malta, where my grandfather worked for the Naafi stores. The lifestyle agreed with her mightily but the damp climate made my aunt ill, and at the end of Grandpa's six-year contract he declined the chance to renew it. The family ­arrived back in Portsmouth in 1932. The Depression was raging, and Grandpa had no job. The family went from a rather blessed existence to poverty.

I think Grandma got stuck, as many of us do. She never let go of Malta; it had been the best time of her life and in her mind it probably became even better than it had been at the time. It wasn't that her life was for ever ruined when the family came home. Grandpa found work eventually and they moved to Richmond, and survived the second world war. She might even have been glad she wasn't still in ­Valletta when the Germans bombed it to hell. But I think part of her had stayed there and never left.

Grandpa worked as a hospital administrator until retirement. My aunt never married and was able to care for her parents for the rest of their lives. They all lived over the road from us in a nice bungalow with a long garden backing on to fields. They even had a veranda. Of course they did. Grandma was too much like a Tennessee Williams character not to have had a veranda. As a boy, I didn't know whether there were other verandas in the world or whether it was The Veranda, like The Acropolis, or one of those family words, unique to us.

All families have their own ­language. Grandma was the only ­person I've ever known to have a "morning room". It was a little dining room that led to the kitchen, but there must have been a morning room in Malta, after which it was named. And for some reason, Grandma didn't say "dinner" or "lunch", which is usually an indicator of social background. She had her "midday meal". Perhaps she was trapped between words, just as she was stuck between classes. Her family had been large, working class and ­suffered its share of childhood mortality. I knew from the outset of my research that her mother was a midwife, and heard that it was true that her father was a policeman, if not a royal protection officer. But I quickly found out that, before and after that, he was a dockyard labourer. Later on, he had a fruit and veg stall, but spent the end of his life between workhouse and hospital because the family could not pay his medical bills.

Grandma, one of the youngest, was pretty and sang beautifully, and I ­suspect she was rather spoilt. Her older siblings had mostly moved out when she was still young. I don't know how much she was sheltered and how much she rewrote history. She spoke of her father making frequent trips to ­London in an attempt to claim his rightful ­inheritance in Sevenoaks. I wonder if she was told or pretended that this was the reason for his absence when he was in the workhouse.

Her story is not the only one in the book. I tried to piece together as much of my family tree as I could. I also wanted to know where my ancestors came from geographically. I strongly suspected, but hated to think, that they all came from south-east England. I had never been entirely satisfied with what appeared to be a completely mono-ethnic ancestry. I hoped to find out that I am partly Jewish, something that Grandma herself once confessed to fantasising about on the basis of being called Rebecca. I am widely believed to be Jewish, by Jews, by neo-Nazis and by dispassionate observers. I should be Jewish. I'm in showbusiness, I can't do DIY and I prefer cheesecake to Victoria sponge. Proper cheesecake, not blancmange on crushed digestive biscuits. My friend Arnold Brown, this country's greatest Jewish comedian, has always insisted that I am Jewish, which I take as a compliment.

I think it always bothered me that nothing I was ever told about my ancestors made them sound very interesting, apart from Grandma's flights of fancy. There was only one minor legend on my dad's side – that his great-grandfather was born outside marriage and should not have been called Hardy at all. Indeed, the story went that his mother was a servant to a landed family and might have been impregnated by one of them; so there could be another country estate to which we have a claim. I identified the village, the estate and the noble family, and found that, if one of them did illicitly sire my great-great-grandfather, my name should, appropriately and magnificently, be Wallop. I didn't manage to uncover the truth about the alleged bastardy while writing the book, but recently found a mum and dad for him; his dad being a farm labourer called William Hardy, although it's possible William made an honest woman of a wronged single mum. Either way, it is quite interesting.

Well, it's interesting if you're me. And I hope I've made my family ­history interesting for others. Because it's a story, a story about people, part truth, part conjecture; a bit like a historical novel – and people read them, don't they? And when you research family history, what's true and what isn't gets blurred. Most family histories have their share of bigamy, illiteracy and illegitimacy. Sometimes you have to guess that you've found the right person. A hundred and fifty years ago, large numbers of people in any given area had identical names; names that they couldn't spell and pronounced in accents too thick for census-takers to decipher. One day, I thought I'd traced a branch of the family back to the 17th century. I only just spotted that they were the wrong Aylotts. Otherwise they'd be our ancestors for ever more.

It's tempting to look at other ­people's family trees on the genealogy websites. You find someone who shares an ancestor with you, and you think you'll borrow their research, until you notice they've got some names wrong. So you check more of their findings and suspect that the shared ancestor is not actually their ancestor at all. Then you dig a little deeper and realise he's probably not yours either. Ultimately, you realise it's not the end of the world. You're still the same person. Who we're descended from is ­interesting, but it's not crucial. Only the other day, I worked out that my great-grandfather's mother was actually his stepmother. But she brought him up, so I'd say she still qualifies as family.

One of the problems with genealogy is its fixation with genes. It encourages an obsession with the blood, and that can lead us down some very dark alleys. For me, ancestry is just one thing that connects us to people, and feeling connected to other people is generally a good thing, as long as one kind of connection does not have primacy over all the others. Heredity, race and nationhood are not the best criteria by which to judge our fellow humans.

Tracing ancestors and wandering around the towns and villages where they lived hasn't told me who I am. That's a profound existential question for people with much more time on their hands. But it's given me a sense of how I fit into the scheme of things, a sense of being a small part of a big picture. It's reassuring and humbling to recognise that you're neither worthless nor special; you're just like everybody else.

Moreover, I've always been ­interested in history and geography. Fourteen-year-olds choose one or the other now, which is a shame. Doing your family tree encourages an interest in both. I love many places to which I have no connection, but identifying an ancestor, or someone I think is an ­ancestor, has taken me to places I'd never have gone to otherwise.

As I kept digging, I found that some of Grandma's stories were nearly true, had elements of truth or might be true. And I found stuff that was ­actually much more interesting than any of those things, but I'm not telling you about that as it's the ­exciting ­denouement of the book. More ­exciting than you can imagine. And I ­actually ­enjoyed finding that some things cannot be proven. There's something reassuring about the possible. It offers potential rather than finality. There's too much closure these days.

And nothing could be more open to debate than what happens in families. Even first-hand accounts vary. You find that siblings were told different things, remember different things and experienced things differently. If you ask what somebody was like, you can only find out what they were like to the person you're asking. And that kind of information can be of limited value in historical study; it's never very enlightening when an ageing German says something like, "Uncle Adolf was always very kind to me."

But one thing that ancestral research confirms is that the family is a complex and confusing institution, and always has been. Any government that thinks it's the bedrock of society might as well throw in the towel immediately. You might be irritated by all the "Me and My Bloody Perfect, Well-Nourished, Well-Housed and Beautiful Family" photo-stories that will fill the supplements this weekend, but you can be guaranteed that their story is a lot more complicated than they let on.

My Family and Other Strangers, by ­Jeremy Hardy, is published by Ebury Press on 4 March, £11.99. To order a copy for £10.99, go to or call 0330 3336846