Welcome to the Emptages of Thanet website. Whether you are browsing or looking for information, I hope you are finding it interesting. I have lived in Western Australia for nearly 30 years now, but before that my life was spent entirely in various parts of the Isle of Thanet in north-east Kent where this story of the Emptage family is set; it’s an area I know and love well.

For most children, today is your whole life, tomorrow a distant promise and yesterday…..definitely not a consideration! So it was for me in the 1950s, during the first 10 years of my life, growing up in the village of Birchington in the Isle of Thanet. My playgrounds were the fields and woods that surrounded our house on the southern edge of the village. Little did I know, that the woods at Quex where we spent hours playing tracking, were a familiar sight to my great-grandfather who was coachman to the Powell-Cotton family who resided at the Quex Estate, or that the remnants of the old windmill in Mill Row, had once played an important part in the life of another great-grandfather, who had been miller for the owners, the Hudson family. When I walked in Sunday procession in the parish church of All Saints in an over-sized, trailing cassock (the gleeful target for any following choir boy), I was oblivious to the fact that so many generations of the family had been baptised, married and buried there.

With age, generally the past becomes more important to us. So, definitely ‘aged’ and with a love of history, three years ago I started my quest into the past with the inevitable, “If only I had asked…”. The frustrations that accompany you at the beginning of the journey, quickly turn into many different emotions, elation when a ‘brick wall’ tumbles, pride when you find an ancestor battling the odds and winning, sadness when they don’t. Joy, when you find an old photo and can put a face to the name and pleasure too when you find similar-minded cousins, no matter how far removed, who are on the same road of discovery but from different starting points. You share a unique bond and this is really how this site came into being. So if it applies to you, we would love to hear from you; if you need help of any kind, we’ll certainly try.

About me: Left school at 18, college, then worked as a draughting technician
and technical illustrator. Next, co-director of an engineering company,
emigrating to W.Australia in the 1980’s due to husband’s health, now retired.

Interests: Drawing and painting, scratch model-making, English history, wildlife
and genealogy.

Lineage:

The line of descent from William Emptage (1767-1848) and Mary Coleman,
on through William Emptage (1814-1900) and Martha Peal,
then via their daughter Martha Emptage (1847-1929).