| Now that building work on our house is over there is more time available to indulge in family history, and I am going over some of the files and also trying to work out how effectively to combine this with preparing a printed version for the resolutely computer illiterate. I also want to distinguish more clearly between ancestors, and lines of cousins, to make navigation through the site more logical. |
There is now a condensed family tree of the first five generations of my ancestors, not yet fully edited but more or less there. It is about all that can be fitted onto a single page. The names are clickable, to go to the relevant page.
Current surnames in the website
Individual names in the website
A list which
is in very slow development at April 2010.
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, at least as a guide to which parish records are worth looking at, 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. For places in the UK I have found the website of the British Ordnance Survey with its Getamap service, and placename search facilities very helpful. It is a pity that the link to the early large scale county map series has been removed from their website.
There are also an Introduction, which says something about how the surname pages are structured, though that is a bit of a movable feast as ideas evolve on how best to present information. The section on sources, says something about the various sources used, and gradually I try to add how and where the information is available, whether online, on CD orwhatever. There is also a kind of gazetteer with information on selected places mentioned in the surname pages. The latter two sections are growing only slowly.
© John Stowell 2003-2009