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Archiver > CHESHIRE > 2006-02 > 1139759017


From: Adrian Powell <>
Subject: Re: [CHS] Family Trees going way back
Date: Sun, 12 Feb 2006 09:43:37 -0600


At 01:24 AM 2/12/06, you wrote:
>I have always been under the impression that you needed to be
>royalty to be able to get your lineage back as far as 1100, or at
>least somebody of note. A family Bible would have needed someone a
>bit literate to fill in details, and it's my guess there wouldn't be
>too many people able to write their own name back then.

Hi Joan:

I agree that it's a rarity to get back beyond the mid 1500s and also
agree that to get to 1100 or so you would have had to have a great
number of "somebodies" in your ancestry.

I'm fortunate in that one branch of the family can be traced back to
about 1495, in Oxfordshire, but only because they happened to be
yeoman farmers, and later, quakers, and there are a few wills that
have survived. It also helped being in Oxfordshire, since they had
the Oxfordshire Marriage Index.

The wills were found on A2A and later filling out the gaps was done
through the help of a few dedicated souls who had already been where
I wanted to go.

Adrian
Winnipeg, Canada

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