WSHC

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 …!

(more…)

The Death of Ann Robins

This is somewhat of an addendum to my last post about Ann Robins, and it’s primarily down to some sterling work by an Archivist at Gloucestershire Archives.

(more…)

Charlotte Kew – Part One

There are always lines or families in your family tree that take precedence over others – they’re either more interesting, more relevant or perhaps just ‘easier’ to find. On the flip side, this means that there are some families which just don’t get the same attention.

For me, one of those families has lurked in the not-too-distant past in my father’s English tree, specifically that of my 4 x great-grandmother, Charlotte Brine nee Kew. But after many years of neglect, I turned to her recently and made a breakthrough and found a few surprises along the way!

(more…)