| During a trip to the UK in 2006 the Special Collections section of the Leeds University Library kindly copied, well they charged for it, material which Katharine Briggs and one of her sisters had been collecting. This included straightforward family history material and typed transcriptions of family letters which they were preparing for publication. The originals of the letters are not with the documents, and presumably ended up elsewhere. I need to list the letters, and will include the list in this website. As to the letters themselves, and the general family historical matter, I will have to ask the Leeds University Library. |
| Recent contacts have included distant Stowell cousins descended from William Stowell (1770-1839), a brother of my thrice-great grandfather the Rev. Hugh Stowell. |
Current surnames in the website
The intention of this website is to make available to whoever might be interested, the results of my limited research into my ancestors, with much dependance on the work of others. I have been looking into my direct ancestors and their siblings, with increasing forays into the realms of cousinhood. I have also pursued connections via marriage where information and interest happened to lead me.
All books on how to go about research into family history warn against relying on anything other than primary sources, and I am well aware that many of the connections noted in this website are not, at any rate at present, based on primary sources. Much of the work has been carried out in New Zealand, and a lot of use has been made of information which is available on the internet, notably of course the IGI, and also from work which has already been done by others. However, despite the limited recourse so far to original sources, I think the majority of the connections shown here are probably about right, and where there is large uncertainty I have mentioned it.
But there is always room for correction and augmentation, and additional information or corrections to information in this website, are always welcome, and indeed one of the aims of creating such a website is precisely to attract such information. I can be contacted by E-mail, and hope that not too many of the contacts are from the famously fictitious owners of suspiciously large bank accounts in odd places!
In addition to people, I have been interested in where they lived and where the various events of their lives took place. In this context I have found the website of the British Ordnance Survey with its Getamap service, placename search facilities, and links to the early large scale county map series a huge help when dealing with places in Britain.
There are also an Introduction, which says something about how the surname pages are structured, a section on sources, and a gazetteer with information on selected places mentioned in the surname pages. The latter two sections are growing only slowly.
© John Stowell 2003/2004/2005