Melanie Chisolm – aka Mel C or Sporty Spice – looks into her family history

Now though Melanie Chisolm – aka Mel C or Sporty Spice – is looking into her family history.

Although she found fame in the girl band, she’s gone on to carve out an impressive solo career – she had number ones with Never Be the Same Again and I Turn to You. She’s also enjoyed success in musical theatre, picking up an Olivier Award nomination for her role in the West End musical Blood Brothers.

Although fans may put that down to her innate talent (she was often singled out as having the strongest voice in the Spice Girls), Melanie believes that her success is also down to her drive and resilience, and she’s keen to find out if that’s something she shares with her ancestors.

Her journey to find out begins in Liverpool, where both sides of her family hail from. She begins by looking into her great-grandmother Mary Bilsborough, who turns out to have been quite a character.

She had several illegitimate children with Melanie’s great-grandfather while her first husband was still alive. However, for Melanie the biggest shock is that Mary is listed on the 1939 Register as a moneylender – given that the family were not well off, how could she have been loaning cash to other people?

In one of the insights into social history that make this series so consistently fascinating, local historian Pat Ayers explains why this profession was more common among working-class women than you might expect.

According to a family rumour, Melanie has Irish roots, so when she discovers Mary’s father was named Patrick Flaherty, she wonders if that could be where the connection starts. It turns out he was born in Liverpool, but his father (also called Patrick) hailed from Croom in County Limerick.

So, that’s Melanie’s next port of call, where she discovers that her third great-grandparents were tenant farmers, and that they started to have children in 1846. This was not a good time to be bringing up a family in rural Ireland, as the Great Famine had begun a year earlier, and Melanie finds how it drove them to the city of Limerick and then to England.

Having looked into the paternal side of her family, Melanie turns her attention to the maternal side, and discovers that once again the Liverpool roots run deep. She does learn though that her fourth great-grandfather Thomas Keef came from Devon.

She discovers that he was an orphan by the age of eight and grew up in a workhouse, but despite this unpromising start, he went onto become a baker and then a manager for an insurance company in Bristol.

However, his life was about to take more twist and turns when he was accused of embezzlement.

So, with mystery as well as history, our first Spice Girls episode should be well worth the wait.