Author: Dominic

I like to write. I like to create worlds and mould people. I possibly like the creating and the backstory more than the story-telling .... I also enjoy photography, and am still learning. I prefer 'raw' photographs - I don't feel drawn to any kind of manipulation, but that may changes. My other main passion in life is genealogy.

52 Ancestors: Where There’s A Will

I have a few way to go here in this post for 52 Ancestors. The full phrase, of course, is “Where there’s a will, there’s a way” meaning that if you’re determined enough in the face of adversity then a way forward can be found. Alternatively, it could be used to refer to wills in the sense of probate and legacies. A third option is the name, William.

Determination … Probate … Williams …

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Joseph & Edith May Holborow

I’m slightly surprised that I haven’t written a post dedicated to my mother’s maternal grandparents here yet. Why am I surprised? Partly because my great-grandmother, Edith, was the oldest person I ever knew as a child. Or at least that I remember knowing.

She also had the most amazing puff of white hair that I’d ever seen.

But who was she, and what about her husband, Joe, who died two years before I was born?

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52 Ancestors: Land

This week’s prompt by Amy Johnson Crow for 52 Ancestors got me thinking. Like the vast majority of people, I don’t have to go very far to find a cast of “ag labs” in my tree. Nor do I have to go into deep history: both my ‘English’ grandfathers (Frysol and Taplin) worked on farms, and and at least one of my American grandfathers were in the farming game at some point in their lives. But I don’t want to talk about that.

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The Ethelberts Neal

So here we are at the third and final Ethelbert post (part 1 here, part 2 here). I mentioned previously that a lot of my Ethelberts were related to the Neal family who were, for a long time, resident in and around the Wiltshire village of Sherston. Thankfully, Sherston is one of those parishes that hasn’t suffered a great loss of it’s parish registers, and that Wiltshire is one of the top counties (obviously I have to say that!) for scanning and transcribing records: the registers are available at FindMyPast, Ancestry and FamilySearch. Top notch. Especially as these often include both the original parish registers AND the Bishops Transcripts, which sometimes include additional information and/or spellings of names. All to the good!

Another bonus is the availability online of a lot of Wiltshire Wills. In fact, back in the day, there used to be a site called the Wiltshire Wills Project (a longer blog post of theirs makes for a very interesting read – many thanks to Jane Silcocks and team for all of their hard work!). This has now all been incorporated into the work done at the Wiltshire & Swindon History Centre in Chippenham, which has also meant that the images are available at Ancestry – and have been pretty key in unpicking some of the Neal(e) lines and their love of repeating the same set of names (Roger, Daniel, Francis amongst them).

But onward to the Ethelberts …!

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In Search of Ethelberts

I like strong unusual names, so when I came across an Ethelbert Holborow in my tree it was too good of a rabbit hole to ignore. Although I don’t have a direct Ethelbert Holborow as an ancestor, I do have a number of other Ethelberts in my tree – mostly all connected with the Neal family in some way.

We’ve already seen one Ethelbert – Harry Ethelbert Stevens/Teagle/Holborow – but there are a few more stories attached to other Ethelberts in my tree, as we shall see …

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Little Ethelbert

Recently I’ve been delving into the Ethelberts in my tree – a master post about them will be coming in the next couple of weeks (so that’s something to look forward to) – and I found something rather unexpected, hence this post first rather than the main post!

One thing I do love about genealogy is the never-ending possibility for surprises. And sometimes those surprises are a lot closer than you think …

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52 Ancestors: Fire

I was initially slightly nonplussed by this week’s 52 Ancestors prompt: I have no firefighters in my tree, nor anybody who has lost their life or livelihood to fire (to my knowledge).

I do know that my Grampy Eddie was involved in a fire that cost him and 2 other families their cottages in Collingbourne Kingston in February 1934 (caused, allegedly, by a petrol engine backfiring and setting an oily rag alight). That plus a 300-year old barn full of sacks of wheat and cottages roofed with thatch spelled disaster.

But I thought that instead I would share something else; something more relevant to the devastating bushfires that ripped through Australia recently.

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52 Ancestors: Nearly Forgotten

I know, it’s been a while since I actually wrote a post for 52 Ancestors (in fairness, it’s been a while since I wrote a post at all), but I was having a thorough muse on this week’s theme and thinking about ancestral stories to share.

And then had a bit of a realisation …

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Holborow in Australia 2: William the Convict

When you’re researching Australian family, there’s always the spectre of transportation, much like Massachusetts in the late 17th century. Back in 2007 it was reported that up to 22% of living Australians were descended from convicts (over 4 million people). There is also a one in 30 chance for us Brits.

I remember studying the topic of transportation when I was at primary school (er, about 30 years ago), but I thought that I could do with a bit of a refresher course – and its amazing to find what records are out there for individuals, alongside the social and political history that goes along with it.

And spoiler alert: I feel some degree of sympathy for our William …

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Holborow in Australia 1: From Wales with Love

One of my long-standing genealogical projects is to create a one-name study of the surname Holborow (variously Holbrow, Holborrow, Holb(o)rough and many transcription errors such as Holbron …). My first step in this has been to document every Holborow event documented in Australia. Why Australia? I couldn’t tell you. Because it’s less than the UK and more than the US? Possibly.

I soon found, thanks to Ancestry and the various state archives (special shout out to Libraries Tasmania, but we’ll get there), National Archives of Australia and the brilliant Trove website with its digitisation of newspapers, that there were only a handful of primary progenitors of historic Holborows in Australia. There are a few outliers, a few arrivals who didn’t leave much of a trace, but plenty of stories to tell: we’ve got mayors, we’ve got murder, we’ve got mystery (and, yes, we’ve got a convict…).

But first, we’ve got Wales …

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