Latest / Stories That Live In Us / Waiting to Be Found (with Hopwood DePree) | Episode 68

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Waiting to Be Found (with Hopwood DePree) | Episode 68 · Stories That Live In Us

• 0:00
  Hopwood DePree: So the sense of history and looking around and seeing the banisters where my ancestors would have run their hands up there and the doorknobs that they would have turned and the paths in the floor where they would have walked, was such a strong feeling.
• 0:13
  Hopwood DePree: I've never really had that sort of sense of being in a foreign land, but yet feeling like I belonged there and like it was home there and like it was home.
• 0:28
  Crista Cowan: Stories that Live In Us is a podcast that inspires you to form deep connections with your family, past, present and future.
• 0:32
  Crista Cowan: I'm Crista Cowan, known online as The Barefoot Genealogist.
• 0:35
  Crista Cowan: I've spent my whole life discovering the power of family history and I know that sharing the stories that live in you can change everything.
• 0:43
  Crista Cowan: When I was growing up, my family moved quite a bit.
• 0:48
  Crista Cowan: I went to two junior highs.
• 0:49
  Crista Cowan: I went to two high schools.
• 0:50
  Crista Cowan: We lived in California, several places, oregon, washington.
• 0:55
  Crista Cowan: I went to school in Idaho, but the constant in my life was always my grandparents' home in Los Angeles.
• 1:01
  Crista Cowan: They bought it when my dad was five years old.
• 1:05
  Crista Cowan: My grandmother lived there until just a few years before she passed in 2018.
• 1:08
  Crista Cowan: And so to me, that place was home, and as a teenager and a young adult, I had fantasies of purchasing it and fixing it up and preserving it and continuing to keep it in the family.
• 1:22
  Crista Cowan: Unfortunately, that wasn't the reality in my life, but I think often about places where our families have lived, the homes that made them who they were.
• 1:35
  Crista Cowan: That home made my father and, in some ways, me.
• 1:39
  Crista Cowan: I talked a few episodes ago about visiting Radley, england, in the little village where my three-times-great-grandmother was raised with her family and where they had lived for generations, and I got to go and visit.
• 1:51
  Crista Cowan: Well, today, my guest also has a connection to a little village in England.
• 1:57
  Crista Cowan: It's called Middleton and the place he is connected to is called Hopwood Hall Estates.
• 2:04
  Crista Cowan: The thing is, unlike me and my grandparents' house, he didn't grow up knowing he was connected to this place, which is kind of ironic considering his first name is Hopwood.
• 2:16
  Crista Cowan: Hopwood Dupree wrote a book called Downton Shabby, all about learning about this part of his family tree, reconnecting with this place in England where his ancestors were from, and then going there and fixing it up and connecting with the village.
• 2:35
  Crista Cowan: As a matter of fact, coming in the fall, ancestry will be sponsoring a series of videos that Hopwood has put together about his adventures with Hopwood Hall Estates and the renovation and the community, and the stories that come out of Hopwood as he shares about his experience with this place are worth listening to, so much so that this is what I thought would make a perfect ending to season one of the podcast.
• 3:05
  Crista Cowan: So please enjoy my conversation with Hopwood Dupree.
• 3:09
  Crista Cowan: Hopwood, thank you so much for joining me today.
• 3:12
  Crista Cowan: I'm excited to have this conversation, to get to know you a little bit better and to hear a little bit about your story.
• 3:17
  Crista Cowan: So thank you for joining us all.
• 3:19
  Crista Cowan: The way I understand from England, tell us where in England you're calling in from.
• 3:23
  Hopwood DePree: Yes, I am calling from Manchester, england, so live over here now full time, but it's great to meet you as well.
• 3:32
  Crista Cowan: Yeah Well, tell me a little bit about what you already knew, about your family history, what you were, what stories you were raised with.
• 3:40
  Hopwood DePree: Well, I grew up with the name Hopwood in the US and it was a challenging name to grow up with.
• 3:46
  Hopwood DePree: On the playground I was getting bullied, everybody didn't like the name and so I was very embarrassed of it.
• 3:53
  Hopwood DePree: I hid the name and my grandfather was also named Hopwood and he would always tell me these bedtime stories about a Hopwood castle in England.
• 4:03
  Hopwood DePree: He called it bedtime stories about a hopwood castle in England.
• 4:07
  Hopwood DePree: He called it, and I always just thought there were fairy tales.
• 4:08
  Hopwood DePree: I really didn't think it was a real place.
• 4:09
  Hopwood DePree: I thought he was just trying to find a way for me to find some happiness with the name and eventually I grew up with the name.
• 4:19
  Hopwood DePree: I ended up going by a completely different name, todd, which is T-O-D, which is my father's initials.
• 4:24
  Hopwood DePree: Completely different name Todd, which is T-O-D, which is my father's initials.
• 4:27
  Hopwood DePree: And it was many years later, as an adult, and I was on Ancestry and I was doing some research and it was after my grandfather had passed away and also my father who had passed away.
• 4:37
  Hopwood DePree: And, like many people searching their genealogy, it often comes after a loss and I was really looking for something that was constant, which was the past, and it felt good to dig in and because he was our family genealogist, my grandfather, it just kind of felt a way to connect with him.
• 4:57
  Hopwood DePree: And so one night I was in Los Angeles at the time and going through the genealogy and doing some research and I came across this amazing old black and white photograph of this huge stately home in England.
• 5:12
  Hopwood DePree: It looked like a castle and it was called Hopwood Hall, and in that moment I knew that that had to be the place that he used to tell me these bedtime stories about.
• 5:22
  Hopwood DePree: I could just tell from the description he would tell me about the many windows and the chimneys and all the doors, and I was struck in that moment that, wow, it's a real place.
• 5:34
  Hopwood DePree: And he was always telling me the truth.
• 5:38
  Crista Cowan: Wow, I love that.
• 5:38
  Crista Cowan: So tell me a little bit more about where you grew up, where you knew your father was from your grandfather, bit more about where you grew up, where you knew your father was from your grandfather.
• 5:53
  Hopwood DePree: Yes, so I grew up in Michigan, in Holland, michigan, and we had always known about our genealogy in the US.
• 5:56
  Hopwood DePree: My grandfather was actually born in a town right outside of Hopwood Pennsylvania, so we knew that our ancestors had come over from England, that they had landed on the East Coast and that they had founded this town of Hopwood Pennsylvania, and he used to hear all of these stories about how the family was in England and they were passed down through the generations, which is where the stories of this Hopwood Castle came from.
• 6:24
  Hopwood DePree: And so when I was a young boy I think I was about six years old we did a genealogy trip out east and went to Hopwood Pennsylvania, but at the time, like I said, I was in kindergarten.
• 6:36
  Hopwood DePree: I really did not like the name, so I really didn't want to go.
• 6:40
  Hopwood DePree: But my sisters and I and my mom and dad, we took a road trip and went out there and saw it, and I remember my mom getting me underneath a sign that said Hopwood, and the only way she would get me to smile was by telling me she would give me a brand new Batman costume.
• 6:57
  Hopwood DePree: I forced a smile and still have that picture to this day and at the time I remember hating taking that picture.
• 7:05
  Hopwood DePree: But now I love that picture because it's such an important memory for me.
• 7:11
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, wow, so you were named after your grandfather.
• 7:14
  Crista Cowan: Was there anybody else in the family that you were aware of that had the same name?
• 7:18
  Crista Cowan: Any cousins like first or second cousins, like anybody else that got that honor?
• 7:23
  Hopwood DePree: Not that I knew of.
• 7:24
  Hopwood DePree: It was a last name originally, so my great-great-grandmother was Elcinda Hopwood, and when she got married she was concerned that the name was going to be lost.
• 7:34
  Hopwood DePree: So that's how it got passed down to my grandfather and then how it got passed down to me.
• 7:40
  Crista Cowan: I love that.
• 7:41
  Crista Cowan: And then, how old were you when your grandfather passed?
• 7:54
  Hopwood DePree: I was in my 30s when he passed away and I wish I had listened more to the story, so I thought of it as being a childhood thing and I just never really.
• 7:59
  Hopwood DePree: You know, it's a big regret that I never really had more conversations with him about it.
• 8:03
  Hopwood DePree: I think it was because I just grew up with a name.
• 8:07
  Hopwood DePree: That was so challenging at the time.
• 8:09
  Hopwood DePree: But you know now he would be so happy for what I'm doing now, being connected back to the hall and taking this adventure of a lifetime that all started while searching my ancestry.
• 8:23
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, wow, lifetime.
• 8:27
  Crista Cowan: It all started while searching my ancestry.
• 8:28
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, wow.
• 8:29
  Crista Cowan: So you go from childhood stories from your grandfather that you thought maybe were fantastical to losing him when you're in your 30s.
• 8:34
  Crista Cowan: And now you've set off kind of on this journey of rediscovering your ancestry and almost kind of, in a way, to honor him and the regret that you express, that regret of not listening, of not asking more questions, hearing more stories.
• 8:48
  Crista Cowan: I think it's such a common thing, but I think there's also something about like, because we didn't, we feel the disconnection, and so then that's usually what sets us on that journey.
• 9:02
  Crista Cowan: And so your journey started with digging into your family history and tell us about the first time you stumbled across Hopwood Hall.
• 9:11
  Hopwood DePree: Well, when I came across that photograph of Hopwood Hall that night, I couldn't believe it, and so I did a little more research and I came across a couple of email addresses connected to it.
• 9:23
  Hopwood DePree: It was an article that I found, so one of them was to the local town council.
• 9:27
  Hopwood DePree: So I sent an email and went to bed, shut my laptop, didn't really think I would necessarily hear anything more, just inquiring for more information about it.
• 9:38
  Hopwood DePree: And if it was still standing and if it was indeed a real place and by the time I woke up in Los Angeles, with the time difference, I already had emails back in my inbox.
• 9:47
  Hopwood DePree: I couldn't believe it.
• 9:48
  Hopwood DePree: So here was this mythical place that I'd heard about my whole life, and suddenly I'm corresponding with people who know where it is and can tell me how to get there.
• 9:56
  Hopwood DePree: And this was early days this is 2013, when this all started, so there wasn't as much on the internet then.
• 10:04
  Hopwood DePree: It really wasn't an easy find.
• 10:06
  Hopwood DePree: I had looked in the past before that, but never had really come across anything.
• 10:10
  Hopwood DePree: So the local council put me in touch with a historian who lived at the hall and was one of the hall's caretakers at Hopwood Hall, and we started conversing.
• 10:22
  Hopwood DePree: And so here I was, across the Atlantic, thousands of miles away from my homeland, I guess, conversing with this local historian who was telling me all sorts of stories about Hopwood Hall, and it really was such an amazing feeling, I can't even explain it.
• 10:39
  Hopwood DePree: And he said they had been looking for an ancestor of the hall.
• 10:44
  Hopwood DePree: And he said they had been looking for an ancestor of the Hall.
• 10:46
  Hopwood DePree: It turned out that it had been abandoned and it had fallen into major disrepair and that the two heirs of the Hall were killed in World War I and so it had fallen out of the family and gone through a series of uses but ultimately was abandoned.
• 11:03
  Hopwood DePree: And he invited me to England.
• 11:07
  Hopwood DePree: He said when are you coming over here?
• 11:15
  Hopwood DePree: We need your help.
• 11:15
  Hopwood DePree: So within a few weeks I was on a plane going over to Europe, and over to England as well, just to see it.
• 11:18
  Hopwood DePree: We were going to go anyway.
• 11:19
  Hopwood DePree: It was my mother and my two sisters and brother-in-law and niece, and we were going to Europe anyway to do some research.
• 11:30
  Hopwood DePree: But we thought, wow, wouldn't it be fun to stop off in England, in Middleton, england, and see Hopwood Hall?
• 11:36
  Hopwood DePree: And so we did, and it was just going to be a one-day adventure journey, but what we discovered there in Middleton changed our lives.
• 11:46
  Crista Cowan: Wow, that's amazing.
• 11:48
  Crista Cowan: I mean amazing that they were so responsive to you and how fortuitous that you arrived at the moment that they were looking for somebody to connect with that place, and how incredible that the first moment you got to lay eyes on it, you were with family.
• 12:05
  Crista Cowan: I think a lot of us, I think, undertake some of these journeys on our own because we're not quite sure what's going to happen but that you had your mom there and your sisters and your niece to be able to experience that together.
• 12:17
  Crista Cowan: Tell us about the moment that you first laid eyes on the hall.
• 12:21
  Crista Cowan: What were your first impressions?
• 12:25
  Hopwood DePree: first light eyes on the hall.
• 12:25
  Hopwood DePree: What were your first impressions?
• 12:26
  Hopwood DePree: It was a feeling like I've never had before because pulling up to it while the Hopwood Hall was in a very rough state, it was magical to me.
• 12:32
  Hopwood DePree: I mean, I remember it had these beautiful leaded glass, diamond cut windows and even though many of them were broken or smashed, I remember the light sparkling off them and it just looked magical as we approached it a big, imposing brick building with all sorts of chimneys, and even though it was very much in a poor state, it still looked beautiful to me.
• 12:57
  Hopwood DePree: The architecture and just being there, the beauty of it was incredible and I couldn't believe that here I was about to walk into this hall in reality, yeah, a piece of history for sure.
• 13:13
  Crista Cowan: Did your family have the same reaction, Like do you think you were having a different experience than they were having in any way?
• 13:19
  Hopwood DePree: I think my mother definitely felt the same as I did and both my sisters did as well, because it was my mother's father.
• 13:27
  Hopwood DePree: So she grew up knowing all these stories as well and then my two sisters did as well.
• 13:32
  Hopwood DePree: Even my young niece found it to be really engaging and magical, even though she didn't quite know, you know, have the connection that we had.
• 13:40
  Hopwood DePree: We had told her stories as well.
• 13:41
  Hopwood DePree: So just I think, coming all the way over to England and being in a very historic land anyway, and just looking at the big ancient trees that were around, and it just had a real magical quality about the whole area.
• 13:59
  Crista Cowan: That's amazing.
• 14:00
  Crista Cowan: So at the time that you first visited, did you already understand exactly what your genealogical connection was to the place?
• 14:07
  Crista Cowan: Or was this just a matter of you'd heard these stories?
• 14:10
  Crista Cowan: You knew there was a connection, but you hadn't figured out exactly how yet?
• 14:14
  Hopwood DePree: Well, I knew there was a connection because my side of the family had come over from England in the 1700s and found in an area in Pennsylvania which later became named as Hopwood Pennsylvania, and in fact it's said that one of the John Hopwood was one of the aid to camps to George Washington and that's how this land that became Hopwood Pennsylvania was given to him.
• 14:43
  Hopwood DePree: So I knew all of those stories and I knew the family came from the England in the 1700s, but we hadn't really jumped the Atlantic to do further research and so, of course, anytime you go into Ancestry there is so much to discover and even today we're still finding stories and different events that happened there that we just are so excited about discovering.
• 15:08
  Hopwood DePree: This is a never-ending adventure of discovery.
• 15:11
  Hopwood DePree: But, yes, we knew enough to connect to the Hall and to really mean something to us.
• 15:18
  Hopwood DePree: But we also very quickly learned it was beyond that connection, that genealogical connection, because the local town people already also had a really strong connection to this property as well.
• 15:32
  Hopwood DePree: So you felt that sense when you arrived and the people that we met there the historian and another caretaker when we arrived at the property and talked to them about it.
• 15:42
  Hopwood DePree: It was also really amazing to see their passion to rescue this building as well.
• 15:51
  Crista Cowan: So how did that all unfold?
• 15:52
  Crista Cowan: You were just going to make a stop on a larger trip to visit this place and now you're living in England.
• 15:59
  Crista Cowan: How do we get from there to there to here?
• 16:03
  Hopwood DePree: Yes, it was incredibly unexpected, but we were taken into the hall by Jeff, the local historian, and Bob, who was the local caretaker, who was kind of a handyman, very skilled at taking care of historic buildings, and they took us all into the hall and we had to put on hard hats and high-vis vests and boots to go in there.
• 16:28
  Hopwood DePree: But as we walked in it had this draw to it.
• 16:33
  Hopwood DePree: You could still see all of the wood carvings on the walls that dated back to the 1500s.
• 16:40
  Hopwood DePree: The house was built in the 1420s.
• 16:42
  Hopwood DePree: So the sense of history and looking around and seeing the banisters where my ancestors would have run their hands up there and the doorknobs that they would have turned and the paths in the floor where they would have walked, was such a strong feeling.
• 16:56
  Hopwood DePree: I've never really had that sort of sense of being in a foreign land, but yet feeling like I belonged there and like it was home.
• 17:03
  Hopwood DePree: And they even showed us areas where there were initials carved into the wall dating to 1689.
• 17:11
  Hopwood DePree: And in a big room that was called the Banquet Room, that was built in 1689 for a wedding between one of the Hopwood families and another prominent family in the area, and just to walk in there and realize that this is where people would have celebrated this wedding centuries before us and this is where we came from was just absolutely an amazing feeling.
• 17:37
  Hopwood DePree: But probably the biggest shock to us was as we passed through the building, we could hear pieces of plaster falling in other rooms next to us.
• 17:47
  Hopwood DePree: We saw water running down the walls of these beautiful carvings from the 1500s and vines were growing in through the windows and many windows had been smashed by vandalism.
• 17:58
  Hopwood DePree: Vines were growing in through the windows and many windows had been smashed by vandalism.
• 18:01
  Hopwood DePree: Mirrors had been broken and historic statues had been pulled down and smashed on the ground.
• 18:08
  Hopwood DePree: So it was really shocking.
• 18:09
  Hopwood DePree: And probably the worst part of the vandalism is that thieves have gotten onto the roof and it was a big slate, huge roof, and they had taken the lead that was holding the slates in place.
• 18:21
  Hopwood DePree: So they had stole that to sell for money.
• 18:24
  Hopwood DePree: But it rains a lot in Manchester and when they took the lead, the water was just poured in there for decades, and so the hall really had gotten into a very sorry state and we were told that if nothing was done in the next five to 10 years, that the hall would become a complete ruin and be lost forever.
• 18:46
  Crista Cowan: Wow, and you were told all of this on your first visit, or was this a subsequent?
• 18:50
  Hopwood DePree: visit.
• 18:51
  Hopwood DePree: This was on the initial walkthrough, so we were there for hours.
• 18:55
  Hopwood DePree: You know it's a huge building.
• 18:57
  Hopwood DePree: It's about 60 rooms, about 50,000 square feet, although we couldn't see much of the hall because a lot of areas were closed off and we had to be safe and we just went into certain rooms.
• 19:08
  Hopwood DePree: But we were really blessed to be there with Jeff the historian, and Bob the caretaker, who had been there for decades, because they knew everything about the building.
• 19:17
  Hopwood DePree: So it wasn't just a quick walkthrough, it was hours and hours.
• 19:21
  Hopwood DePree: We finally had to go because daylight was fading and we were so enthralled with all the stories.
• 19:28
  Hopwood DePree: There were fireplaces with the family crest still emblazoned on them and the heraldic animal on the fireplace, and even a family motto which I never had heard before was by degrees, and they explained that it's because the Hopwoods were archers and they helped win the Battle of Flodden Field in the year 1513.
• 19:51
  Hopwood DePree: And so the difference between hitting a bullseye or missing the target completely in archery is simply by degrees.
• 19:57
  Hopwood DePree: So it was all of these sort of connections that just drew us in and we couldn't believe it.
• 20:06
  Hopwood DePree: And we had so much information I think it's so much more than we believed would happen.
• 20:11
  Hopwood DePree: You know, the fact that Bob and Jeff were there giving us their time so generously and taking us around really made us want to be part of it and want to help save it.
• 20:21
  Crista Cowan: Wow, yeah, here we are.
• 20:23
  Crista Cowan: This was what 12 years ago.
• 20:26
  Hopwood DePree: Yeah, I think it's almost 12 years ago to the day, almost really.
• 20:29
  Crista Cowan: Oh, wow, yeah.
• 20:32
  Crista Cowan: So here you are 12 years later and clearly you're rehearsed in talking about this story and that memory of that day.
• 20:39
  Crista Cowan: But when you think back and put yourself in that day 12 years ago, like that's a lot of information to take in and a lot of sensory information to take in and a lot of emotional connection, and like there's a lot happening in that day, is this information like things that you've just gotten rehearsed at sharing because you've now had 12 years of history with the hall?
• 21:04
  Crista Cowan: Or, when you walked away that day, what had you really retained from that experience?
• 21:10
  Hopwood DePree: Well, probably the biggest thing that I retained was they took me into this oak paneled room and it was in the oldest section of the house and that dated to the 1420s, and they said this is where Bob called it the birthing room, and he said this is where your 14th great-grandfather would have been born.
• 21:30
  Hopwood DePree: And so here it was, still standing, the woodwork was still there, the wood paneling, the fireplace with the molding was all still there.
• 21:39
  Hopwood DePree: So the fact that I we could see that reach out and touch the past was, I think, that's what moved me the most and probably the thing that made the most impression on me.
• 21:50
  Hopwood DePree: Yes, I mean, I've been here for 12 years, so even after that first visit, you know I've given it so much thought.
• 21:57
  Hopwood DePree: I even wrote a book about the whole experience.
• 22:00
  Hopwood DePree: So you know it's easier to sort of recount really how I felt and thought, but at the time it was, you know, the world was spinning around me.
• 22:08
  Hopwood DePree: It really was.
• 22:10
  Hopwood DePree: It was like hearing that Bigfoot exists and never believing it.
• 22:14
  Hopwood DePree: And then one day he shows up at your front door.
• 22:16
  Hopwood DePree: You know, so hard to wrap any of our heads around it, my family as well.
• 22:23
  Hopwood DePree: We just knew.
• 22:23
  Hopwood DePree: We were so moved by the experience that we had to get involved to do something, and that's really where it started.
• 22:30
  Hopwood DePree: And then we left.
• 22:31
  Hopwood DePree: You know, we were only there for a day, day and a half, and then I ended up going back to Los Angeles after that.
• 22:37
  Hopwood DePree: So it wasn't an immediate decision to move over to save it.
• 22:42
  Hopwood DePree: I mean, that really took a number of years before I got to that point.
• 22:47
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, so tell us about that.
• 22:48
  Crista Cowan: Like you have this experience, this moving, emotional, connecting experience with not just a part of your distant past, but really this reconnection with your grandfather and the stories that he told you, and what was the next decision point or the next moment that, like, reconnected you with the Hall?
• 23:11
  Hopwood DePree: Well, I went back to Los Angeles and at the time I was working in the entertainment business there and I had really, even when I first started doing the research, I think I had been looking for something more.
• 23:23
  Hopwood DePree: Especially with the death of my grandfather and my father, I really felt like maybe Hollywood wasn't necessarily where I was going to spend the rest of my life.
• 23:33
  Hopwood DePree: I was looking for something deeper.
• 23:34
  Hopwood DePree: So I think I found it at Hopwood Hall.
• 23:37
  Hopwood DePree: It just seemed to almost be a calling in a way, that when I went back to Los Angeles I couldn't stop thinking about it and I was always wanting to get in touch with Bob and Jeff.
• 23:48
  Hopwood DePree: And you know I would hear that there would be a major rainstorm in Manchester.
• 23:54
  Hopwood DePree: So I would contact Bob and say how did the hall hold up over the weekend?
• 23:57
  Hopwood DePree: I hear there was a gigantic storm.
• 24:00
  Hopwood DePree: And he would say, oh, we lost another section of the long gallery plaster ceiling.
• 24:05
  Hopwood DePree: And you know we're doing our best, we're trying to help shore it up, but we just we don't have enough hands, we don't have enough money, we don't know what to do.
• 24:14
  Hopwood DePree: It really was a sense of being a bit helpless but also wanting to help.
• 24:18
  Hopwood DePree: So I started making visits over to England two or three times a year just to get involved and try to work with the community, and there was people in the community wanting to help save it.
• 24:32
  Hopwood DePree: There was a few different ideas of what could happen with it, but there was a potential for it to become a hotel.
• 24:37
  Hopwood DePree: So I was just trying to help as much as I could in those years, going back and forth and also finding a real sense of peace by doing that.
• 24:48
  Hopwood DePree: So by coming over to England and seeing all these people that treated me like family, it was really an incredible experience.
• 24:56
  Hopwood DePree: My family often came with me on these trips.
• 24:59
  Hopwood DePree: But we realized that it wasn't enough to try to be involved from afar because the project wasn't advancing for one reason or another.
• 25:11
  Hopwood DePree: Really going back and forth before I finally made that big decision to move over, get a UK visa and spearhead the project full time.
• 25:26
  Crista Cowan: And that is not a small project, right Like you've got a ticking clock.
• 25:30
  Crista Cowan: You know that first visit when they tell you there's only five to 10 years.
• 25:33
  Hopwood DePree: The fact that you're contacting them regularly and hearing about new pieces of the hall that are being lost or destroyed through just even just the elements like like the pressure of that, I imagine is is motivating but also maybe a little discouraging yes, it was definitely overwhelming, but and and to overwhelming, and to pick up my life in the US and completely move to a new country where I didn't really know anybody except the locals I had met, I didn't really have any way of setting up shop.
• 26:09
  Hopwood DePree: You know, it was a lot to just start over at that age.
• 26:13
  Hopwood DePree: But I also thought about it for a long time and I realized that if somebody had called me five or 10 years down the road and said you know, hopwood Hall has been lost forever.
• 26:26
  Hopwood DePree: It's now a complete ruin.
• 26:28
  Hopwood DePree: Nobody could save it.
• 26:29
  Hopwood DePree: I think that would have been one of my biggest life regrets.
• 26:32
  Hopwood DePree: And I felt I could do it.
• 26:35
  Hopwood DePree: And I felt, with the experience I had working in the entertainment business and producing films and producing lifestyle events like film festivals, I felt like I had the skills to bring in all the different pieces and moving parts of working with the community and finding grant funders and getting support and managing the operations.
• 26:57
  Hopwood DePree: You know, trying to bring all that together is what I enjoyed doing and what I was used to.
• 27:01
  Hopwood DePree: So, even though I had never renovated a huge 60-room house before that was falling down, I did have some experience in project management and felt like I could take this on.
• 27:13
  Crista Cowan: I love that you made that connection.
• 27:15
  Crista Cowan: I think so many times we get stuck in a rut of believing that our skills are only useful in one particular way, but that you were able to bridge that and see how the skills you had developed could help in this situation.
• 27:27
  Crista Cowan: I think that's a gift that you had the ability to have that kind of vision.
• 27:33
  Hopwood DePree: Oh, thank you.
• 27:33
  Hopwood DePree: Yeah, I guess it probably comes from the fact that I was really searching for something new.
• 27:38
  Hopwood DePree: You know, I feel like when you're searching for something and then an opportunity presents itself, you really have to kind of follow up with that because you've put it out there.
• 27:50
  Hopwood DePree: So I felt like I needed to look at every angle why this was happening, and that's where I came up with that that I could do this, somehow convince myself that I could do this, so what year was it that you?
• 28:03
  Hopwood DePree: moved to England.
• 28:04
  Hopwood DePree: That was the end of 2017.
• 28:14
  Crista Cowan: Okay, and did you just jump right in right away?
• 28:15
  Crista Cowan: Did it take you some time to get things kind of in place as far as infrastructure for this larger vision that you have?
• 28:19
  Hopwood DePree: as far as infrastructure for this larger vision that you have.
• 28:23
  Hopwood DePree: Well, in retrospect, that four years was a really good buildup to moving over, because I had made great friends.
• 28:29
  Hopwood DePree: They had a great network of people there to help.
• 28:32
  Hopwood DePree: I knew a lot of the people in the heritage industry by that time, and so when I moved over, yes, we just jumped right in.
• 28:39
  Hopwood DePree: I was here I think actually it was about mid-August and by September about not quite even four weeks later we had the hall open, just a few rooms, but we opened it to the public, spoke with a local council and, for health and safety reasons, we were only allowed to have 100 people come in in hard hats throughout the day, so in small groups of 10 people at a time, which was great, and we felt like that would probably at least get all those locals in who were so curious about what the inside of a hall looked like.
• 29:14
  Hopwood DePree: And so we put out an event notice and suddenly we had not only the 100 spots filled but we had 600 people on the waiting list.
• 29:24
  Hopwood DePree: And that's when we really realized there was a tremendous local passion for this project, for it to be saved, and what I quickly realized in meeting all of these people that were coming through is that so many of them were descendants of the people who helped build and run the estate.
• 29:40
  Hopwood DePree: So, in addition to me having a family connection, they had a family connection and I met people whose great-great-grandfathers were chauffeurs and housemaids and worked in the laundry cottage and were gardeners, and so it just kept going on and on.
• 29:58
  Hopwood DePree: And so many of these people had still lived in the same town 500 years later and they wanted to help save it as well.
• 30:05
  Hopwood DePree: So I felt this tremendous outpouring of community help and passion to save it.
• 30:11
  Hopwood DePree: So we really we formed a friends group and band together and just started off on our efforts and it really just started taking off from there right away.
• 30:21
  Crista Cowan: Wow, it's like a whole different kind of a family tree when you start looking at all of those connections, right?
• 30:26
  Hopwood DePree: It really is, and that's what I'm so excited about the new networks feature on Ancestry because it allows you to go in and connect with all of these different people, and I'm just so excited about building that out.
• 30:40
  Hopwood DePree: We've also had people come over from the US who have traced their ancestry back to Hopwood Hall as well, so we've had guests come over and visit and look around, and so I just think it's incredible with this new networks feature and how we can probably connect with people all over the world and bring sort of this big, gigantic family back together, whether it was their family who lived there or somebody who worked there or somebody who helped build it.
• 31:09
  Hopwood DePree: There's so many people.
• 31:10
  Hopwood DePree: Just the amount of stories that will go on and on is really exciting.
• 31:14
  Crista Cowan: That is exciting.
• 31:15
  Crista Cowan: That's so fun, With your background in the entertainment industry.
• 31:18
  Crista Cowan: Were you capturing video footage of this whole experience from beginning to end?
• 31:24
  Crista Cowan: Or was there a moment when it was like, oh, maybe this is something we should be doing?
• 31:29
  Hopwood DePree: Actually, yes, I filmed most everything, even the initial trip over.
• 31:35
  Hopwood DePree: I love to film stuff and that had been my background.
• 31:39
  Hopwood DePree: So then I even started a YouTube channel in 2017 just to chart our progress, and that was mainly just for family and friends, because a lot of them were still stayed in the US, so they were constantly wondering what's going on.
• 31:53
  Hopwood DePree: And so I just thought, well, let me show you what's happening, because you know, we're discovering secret rooms and we're, you know, pulling back a ceiling and finding a hidden chest in there, and we're finding initials carved in the wall and all these huge discoveries and it just didn't.
• 32:09
  Hopwood DePree: It didn't work to just tell people about it.
• 32:12
  Hopwood DePree: So we started filming all of that and made a YouTube channel about it and really have not stopped filming.
• 32:18
  Hopwood DePree: So ultimately, we'll probably cut together a documentary out of the whole thing.
• 32:24
  Crista Cowan: I would hope, something that's amazing If you think, like now you've been involved in this project.
• 32:32
  Crista Cowan: What eight years in England on the ground doing this work?
• 32:38
  Crista Cowan: Is there one story or one moment or one discovery that kind of rises above the others as something that was most meaningful or impactful or surprising to you?
• 32:50
  Hopwood DePree: There are quite a few.
• 32:51
  Hopwood DePree: I mean, every day is an adventure there.
• 32:54
  Hopwood DePree: But probably the biggest surprise to us is I was working with Bob and there was a very ornate ceiling above a fireplace that dates back to 1657, I believe, and he needed to take part of the plaster down because water had been leaking in and there was a real fear that it was going to be destroyed.
• 33:16
  Hopwood DePree: So he wanted to take all the plaster down, label it, number it and put it for safekeeping so that it could be restored in the future.
• 33:24
  Hopwood DePree: As he was taking this plaster down, there was a crack in the ceiling above where one of the plaster moldings was, and it was bigger than a crack, it was a hole, and so he shined a light up there and we could see there was a big space up there.
• 33:41
  Hopwood DePree: It was much higher than where the ceiling was and we realized that that was some kind of a room up there above the fireplace.
• 33:49
  Hopwood DePree: So we went around to another side of the wall and we ended up opening up and going in to this and we realized that it was a priest hole dating back to the 1600s where Catholic priests would have hid in fear of their lives, and it was all cobwebs everywhere and mold and it was very dark and dank and the air was very still in there and I was really scared to be up there.
• 34:23
  Hopwood DePree: I felt like I was in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
• 34:25
  Hopwood DePree: I felt like mics were going to come on at me.
• 34:27
  Hopwood DePree: It felt so strange.
• 34:30
  Hopwood DePree: But then over in the corner of that room, I saw what looked like a chest and it was all covered in cobwebs and this is all on video.
• 34:39
  Hopwood DePree: We made a video about it and we ended up taking that chest down from that room and it was an old tabernacle which was part of a Catholic you know, part of Catholic religion and so it had been hidden up there, stored up there for all those centuries, we believe, and so we actually took it to someone from Christie's to help us identify what it was and what it could be and what age it was.
• 35:07
  Hopwood DePree: And I think that that was probably the most surprising to me that there was still something in there waiting to be found like that for all those, all those centuries.
• 35:16
  Hopwood DePree: And there's probably still many more things to discover in the hall.
• 35:27
  Crista Cowan: Wow, that's amazing.
• 35:27
  Crista Cowan: I can't even imagine the connections that you have not just to your past but just to massive historical moments in England's history like that.
• 35:34
  Crista Cowan: That's incredible that you can not only touch those things but have those discoveries still be something new for you and for everybody involved.
• 35:44
  Crista Cowan: I bet Bob is losing his mind on a regular basis.
• 35:49
  Hopwood DePree: He's constantly finding something I love.
• 35:52
  Hopwood DePree: You know, every time I would go there there would be something He'd be come this way, come this way.
• 35:56
  Hopwood DePree: Look at this, it never stopped.
• 35:57
  Hopwood DePree: Look at this, it never stopped.
• 36:05
  Hopwood DePree: But it's exciting to think about that this could all be preserved, and saved for future generations as well.
• 36:08
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, yeah, that's amazing.
• 36:09
  Crista Cowan: Well, I have one final question for you, but before I ask that, if you want people to follow along on your adventure, what's the best way for them to do that?
• 36:19
  Crista Cowan: Is it your YouTube channel?
• 36:20
  Crista Cowan: Do you have somewhere else you'd like to direct them?
• 36:23
  Hopwood DePree: Yes, I'm on all social media, and on YouTube is the best way to follow along.
• 36:28
  Hopwood DePree: I think there's about 100 episodes up there that people can watch right now, and that's my YouTube channel is HopwoodXIV for the 14 generations, and I'm also on, you know, all the other social media platforms as well.
• 36:43
  Hopwood DePree: And then I also wrote a book which I called Downton Shabby and that's available online and that tells a whole story, really, from coming from Los Angeles and moving over, and that was published by HarperCollins in 2022.
• 36:59
  Crista Cowan: That's amazing.
• 37:00
  Crista Cowan: Well, thank you, I'm excited to go dig into it a little bit more.
• 37:04
  Crista Cowan: I've been a little familiar with your story just because of my colleagues here at Ancestry and some of the work that they've done, but to dig in a little bit more after our conversation, I think I'm intrigued by all of this and I would love to know more about the whole story.
• 37:21
  Hopwood DePree: Yeah, I should also add that we have put together some videos with Ancestry as well, and those are going to be premiering on the Ancestry YouTube channel as well.
• 37:34
  Hopwood DePree: We're very excited about that and showcases all sorts of different stories and discoveries at Hopwood Hall and also other people's stories that are coming over from different parts of the world to visit Hopwood Hall who are connected to it, to their ancestry as well.
• 37:49
  Crista Cowan: I love that.
• 37:49
  Crista Cowan: Well, the next time I come to England I may have to come visit.
• 37:53
  Hopwood DePree: That would be amazing yeah.
• 37:56
  Crista Cowan: Well, so my last question for you is the same question I ask all of my guests, which is, as you think about where you've been and how this whole journey has unfolded, and look to the future.
• 38:07
  Crista Cowan: What is it that you hope for the future?
• 38:10
  Crista Cowan: For Hopwood Hall or for your own journey as you continue on this path?
• 38:15
  Hopwood DePree: Well, in doing the research about the hall, I found that it's always been a hub for people, for the community, for visitors from near and far, and I would love to see that restored and make it a place that the community can come and we can have events, and that people from around the world can come and connect with it and feel the same magic that I felt when I first walked through it.
• 38:40
  Hopwood DePree: For me, starting out and doing this research and tracing my family history, I never would have believed that it would take me on this incredible adventure of my lifetime and I feel so lucky and just really owe it all to you.
• 38:59
  Hopwood DePree: Know, if you're searching for your answers out there, it's always good to look to the past because there's so many clues that are there that will give you a way forward.
• 39:08
  Crista Cowan: That was so beautifully said.
• 39:09
  Crista Cowan: Thank you so much and thank you for being here.
• 39:11
  Crista Cowan: Studio sponsored by Ancestry.