My mother was an Emptage, born in Canterbury, Kent, England but I’d never heard her speak of any members of her family other than her parents and her siblings.

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When I started researching her family history I discovered that her family had connections to Margate and Ramsgate and as I delved deeper I realised that the Emptage name was deeply connected with the Isle of Thanet.

And, as the Isle of Thanet has a long coastline, whilst some ancestors were associated with agriculture inland, many of our ancestors were closely associated with the sea, including my mother’s great grandfather, his father and his grandfather.   I find this somewhat astonishing as my mother would turn green merely at the sight on television or films of a boat or ship rolling around on high seas.

Having made contact with other family historians researching the same name, the research has grown beyond anything that I ever envisaged, including the belief that every Emptage in the world is descended from the same small island. So we now have a worldwide study of the name, a DNA project and a theory regarding our Anglo-Saxon roots.

The Emptages of Thanet now have their own website: http://emptageofthanet.co.uk/