ONE of the most persistent slurs of our time is that Australians of British ancestry are all descended from convicts.

The majority are not. But some are: and when John Fearnley of Sydney started researching his family history, it wasn’t long before he came across an ancestor with English ‘form’.

John had worked out that he came from a long-established Scholes family, Scholes being a hamlet on the outskirts of Cleckheaton.

Scholes is in the ancient parish of Birstall, and one of the most prominent churches in the area was Whitechapel, just north of Cleckheaton.

John Fearnley reckoned that if his ancestors lived in Scholes, there was a good chance they were buried at Whitechapel.

The present Anglican church was built in 1820 on a site associated with over nine centuries of worship, supporting, in its time, Roman Catholic, Protestant, Puritan, Methodist and Anglican worship.

Links with this site have been made to the Romans, the Brontës and the Knights Hospitaller, a grave slab of one of the knights being in the entrance to the church.

So John and his wife Liedy marked Cleckheaton as a major port of call this year in their ancestor search.

Whitechapel churchwarden and treasurer Philip Hardill helped the Fearnleys while they were in England and is in regular email contact with them as research progresses.

“It was an extremely useful trip for them,” he said. “John had obviously started on his family tree before he came here.

“It was a super thing for us to get involved in.”