Category: Family History

Going Around and Around

4/5/2026

Well! Are you leaving or not?

Research-wise, I feel I am going round and round, like being on one of those children's roundabouts in a park. I want to get off, but I am afraid that if I do, I may miss something fascinating; if I don’t, I will never move on!

My historical playground is the stretch of coastline known as the Axminster to Lyme Regis Undercliff (itself part of the Jurassic Coastline), which has been described as an area of outstanding beauty. I mean, who would want to stop looking at views like this, or learn about its ‘mosaic habitat’ of woodland, scrub, cliffs and a seashore littered with boulders, seakale and rock samphire.

Photo © John Allan (cc-by-sa/2.0)

How can I move on when I read a description such as this:

‘Here you must calculate every step and nicely test the mossy hummocks before fully trusting them; finally emerging upon an open plain midway between the sea below and tall cliffs above; a plain where rocks of every shape and size have been hurled down in extraordinary confusion. Here, the explorer requires not a little of the suppleness and agility of the chamois, and growing at last weary of bounding hazardously from crag to crag, climbs with extraordinary labour, past monstrous grey, ivy-grown spires and pinnacles of limestone, up a winding footpath in the face of the cliff, to where the Whitlands Coastguard station looks down upon the tumbled scene. From this point, the coastguard path lies along the cliffs' edge, to where the cliffs die down to the waterside in the deep coombe in whose woods the sea comes lapping at Charton Bay. Here, a limekiln, that looks romantic enough for a castle, stands on the beach, with the dense woods climbing backwards, and in the sky the roofs and tower and chimneys of Rousdon.(1)

There is a lot of other stuff to ponder on as I make myself dizzy. There’s that Roman Road (A3052 at Charton Cross) and the history of a tunnel entrance that was originally a limekiln, now overgrown, that runs alongside Charton (2) my ancestor’s manor.

Sadly, I do have to leave soon. I cannot sit here all day, can I?

Time is moving on, and I am fast approaching the year 1348. Unfortunately, my ancestor’s manor, overlooking this undercliff, is just forty miles west of Melcombe Regis/Weymouth, and you will know what happened there that year, don’t you!

Perhaps I will spin a few more times before I do get off, because I really don’t want to know if Gilbert Umfreville or his son and daughters succumbed to the Black Death.

1. The South Devon Coast - Charles G Harper, London: Chapman & Hall, 1907.
2. Today, this manor is known as Charton; however, in 1086 it was Dune, in 1303 it was Down St Leonards and later Down Umfreville.

0 Comments

Stepping into the 17th Century

20/5/2020

3 Comments

The parish church of St Columba sits at the heart of the ancient town of St Columb Major in Cornwall. In this churchyard lie many of my ancestors who lived in and around the town from the early 15th century and where my family still live today.

In the image above you can see a passageway under the churches clock tower. This path was a right of way to a college founded by my ancestor Sir John Arundell in 1427. The Arundell's, for many years, were influential within the town, a number of them prayed in their private chapel and are buried inside the church, you can see one of them in the image below, their ancestral home was in a neighbouring village.

However, it is another St Columb Major family I am researching at present, that is the family of Scoboryo, a family whose ancient origins lie further south and most of whose mortal remains lie peacefully in the churchyard.

The Scoboryo family story, in regard to the survival of a family and in particular it's surname, is a sad one - the fine detail I have yet to discover. It begins however with a marriage in 1641.

You can imagine a small wedding party walking to St Columba's church on a cold morning in February. The wedding and the feast that followed would likely have been a grander affair than what other members of the town could expect, the Scoboryo's being either gentry or yeoman farmer's. Three years later two children were born and baptised, only the son Thomas making it into adulthood. Eventually, Thomas would be the father of fifteen children, a good basis, you would think, to start a small but successful Cornish dynasty. However, this was not to be, Thomas's children were born in the years between 1669 and 1694, but by 1695 only three, two daughters and a son had survived - the other twelve had joined their grandparents in the parish churchyard.

If all of these children had survived then eight of them, being boys, would have seen to it that this unusual surname would have been around for a few more generations, but sadly this did not happen, for it was left to my ancestor, the one surviving son, to carry the name of Scoboryo into the future - and this he did successfully, but two generation later, the surname, in St Columb Major at least, was extinct.

My research continues.

3 Comments

The Black Death

20/6/2018

0 Comments

The Black Death, from the October of 1347 to around 1352, it has been said, did not eradicate a third of Europe’s population.

Open almost any textbook on western civilization says historian Sam Cohn and it will claim that the Black Death wiped out one-third of Europe’s population. In fact, in some places such as a village on an estate in Cambridgeshire manorial rolls attest that 70 per cent of its tenants died in a matter of months in 1349. Yet, the plague skipped over or barely touched other villages, even within Cambridgeshire, and may not have infected at all vast regions such as ones in northern German-speaking lands.

I wonder why certain villages suffered when others didn't?

In 1767, just over two hundred years before the birth of my ancestor James Toon in the village of Thringstone in Leicestershire, there were only twenty-six families in his village and only forty-two in the two neighbouring villages of Whitwick and Swannington, according to records it was the Black Death that devastated the village seeing off nearly all the population and after that population growth in this village and the surrounding area was slow.

My family, it seems, were one of the lucky ones.

You can read about my Toon ancestors here:

meanderingthroughtime.weebly.com/john-toon-1799.html

0 Comments

The Royal Air Force

1/4/2018

1 Comment

The countries Royal Air Force is 100 years old today, it was founded in 1918 and for over twenty years it was a big part of my life.

Most of us will remember the Royal Air Force for the bravery of its members during the Battle of Britain when they defended our country against the German air force and scuppered their attempted invasion of Britain and in the present time their sorties during the Iran/Iraq and Gulf Wars.

My father was a member of the RAF for twenty-five years, the squadron he was part of flew planes such as the Argosy, the Phantom and later the Tornado and his last posting was to the home of the 617 Squadron, famous for the Dambuster raids during WW2, so I got a look inside one of the last remaining Lancaster Bombers and on the odd occasion sit in the cockpit of a jet fighter.

Being a child in an air force family had its ups and downs. My dad, for instance, was sent on a couple of unaccompanied tours abroad which meant that there was trouble in the country to which he was posted, and therefore it was deemed too dangerous for us to go with him - he spent three years by himself in the Middle East while we lived in Cornwall with my grandparents.

Families were never in the same place for long, you had friends but often their fathers were sent to a different base than you. The longest a family spent on a base was three years, but you could be moved pretty quickly, for instance, I spent my last year of primary education in three different counties, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire and Cambridgeshire. One base I particularly remember was RAF Syerston in Nottinghamshire because I remember my brother and I, at the age of seven and five, walking to school on our own (I didn't let my own children out of my sight at that age!)

Unknown to me at the time was that RAF Syerston's neighbouring village is East Stoke and the base is situated right next to Stoke Field, where, in 1487, a Yorkist army made their last stand against the new Tudor regime - you can see how close I lived from the image above - how exciting is that? As I said I was just seven, but to think that my little feet walked those fields all those years ago and I didn't know anything about Henry Tudor or the Wars of the Roses.

On the whole being part of the Royal Air Force was a positive experience for me, it made me self-reliant and able to adapt to a new situation pretty quickly, on the funny side I have never been able to dispose of boxes or paper bags, a result of packing and unpacking my belongs no doubt. However, it was not always a good experience for my dad, some of the things he had to deal with were not very nice.

Apart from being interested in history anyway, I often wonder if being part of a big military family is why I am so interested in that sort of thing now.

If you click on the link below you can read about Operation Grapple one of my father's first experience in the Royal Air Force.

meanderingthroughtime.weebly.com/history-blog/operation-grapplethe-dropping-of-britains-first-h-bomb

1 Comment

The English Civil War

23/9/2017

0 Comments

In the book 1066 and All That, a humorous and satirical look at history, it states that the English Civil Wars were fought between the Cavaliers (Wrong but Wromantic) and the Roundheads (Right but Repulsive) and that Charles I thought that

"He was king and that was right, kings were divine and that was right, kings were right,
and that was right, and therefore everything was alright"

We may find the ideas of Divine Right ludicrous and amusing today, but what must be remembered is the cost of it to our ancestors.

The English Civil Wars put family against family and father against son and no better example of this is William Frederick Yeames's painting where a little boy in a royalist household is being spoken to by parliamentarians who ask the question "And When Did You Last See Your Father" which quite naturally puts the child in a difficult position and his family in a dangerous one.
While researching my 17th century Cornish ancestors I wondered if any of them found themselves in this position, for many were loyal to their king - however a few were not, I have discovered it certainly placed friend against friend. Sir Bevill Grenville of Stowe in Cornwall was a Royalist whose allegiances were torn when his friend St John Eliot of St Germans was incarcerated, on more than one occasion, in the Tower of London for his views on parliamentary rights. Eliot eventually died in the Tower and King Charles refused his son permission to bury his father in his homeland cruelly stating

"Let Sir John Eliot be buried in the church of that parish where he died."

These men were dealing directly with the fall out of King Charles I's ideas of the Divine Right of Kings and his attempt to enforce it in the wars that raged between 1642 and 1651. These wars resulted in the loss of over eighty thousand lives plus the hundreds of thousands who died from war related diseases, ultimately though King Charles I would be held responsible and he would pay with his life.

My research into this period is presently focusing on my family in the years 1636 to 1646, this family lived in the Cornish village of St Columb Major. You can see some of the architecture from that period in two of the images below.

In 1641 the marriage of my ancestor took place just five days before parliament passed the Triennial Act, an Act that was drawn up to prevent kings from ruling without Parliament, and in 1645 Royalist troops, under Sir Thomas Fairfax, camped just outside St Columb Major.

0 Comments

George Orwell

25/6/2017

0 Comments

George Orwell, author of such books as Animal Farm, 1984 and The Road to Wigan Pier was born this day in 1903.

Orwell's book, Wigan Pier, his vision of a fractured society that funnily enough is as relevant today as it was when he wrote it in 1937, is a book that is close to my heart.

When researching his book, Orwell visited the Yorkshire town of Barnsley, watching and talking with the men whose lives were solely dependent on a living made from the coal mines, he used what he learnt there as reference for this book.

Coal was many thing to many people, some became rich because of it, many died because of it but it was the mainstay of my Taylor family's whole existence. Reading Wigan Pier, listening to my grandparent's stories of their life in the mines and writing their story, I know exactly what Orwell meant when he wrote:

"If there is one type of man to whom I do feel myself inferior, it is the coal miner."

My paternal ancestors story, a Life in the Dark, can be read on my website at:

meanderingthroughtime.weebly.com/taylor-of-yorkshire.html

0 Comments

The English Civil War Begins

20/1/2017

0 Comments

It was on the 4th January in 1642, that King Charles I, accompanied by a number of soldiers, arrived at Westminster with the intent to arrest John Pym, John Hampden, Denzil Holles, Arthur Haselrig and William Strode, five Members of his Parliament on the grounds that they had encouraged the Scots to invade England.

William Strode was the son of William Strode of Plympton in Devon, he married into the Meavy family of Meavy, eventually owning their estates in Devon.

The painting below, by Charles West Cope, shows the attempted arrest, it can be seen in the Houses of Parliament.

0 Comments

Robert and Elizabeth Carey: My Last Link With Nobility

10/1/2017

0 Comments

Everyone has their favourite era within history and mine, of course, is the Medieval period. Part of this is due to the fact that I have a keen interest in Richard III and the Wars of the Roses, but I think its also due to the fact, that whilst researching my family history, I have found that I have family connections that place me in this period, right in the middle of a time of change within the monarchy and society itself. Being able to look at an important event from a personal point of view, of how it affected a particular family member, makes these events much easier to understand, and consequently makes the wider time frame so much more interesting.

By the time of the early eighteenth century my family had moved from being members of the royal family, through the nobility into the life of the ordinary man. My last real association with monarchy is with Elizabeth Trevanion, wife of Robert Carey who was grandson of Mary Boleyn. Elizabeth, seen here with her three children, was responsible for the care of King Charles I as a small boy. After this, my family are classed as gentry/very minor land owners and later agricultural labourers, merchant seamen and miners. Don't get me wrong, these people are very important too, they have their own story to tell.

One of the men I admire most is my great great grandfather, whose hard life brings a tear to my eye every time I think of him, and as it turns out not to be my blood ancestor at all.

With the above in mind, I think one of the reasons my least favourite group of monarchs are the Hanoverian's, I have no point of reference, no one to link to the main events in the lives these monarchs.

My great great grandfathers story can be read here:

meanderingthroughtime.weebly.com/taylor-of-yorkshire.html

0 Comments

Studying YOUR Family Tree

7/1/2017

0 Comments

The writer of the letter below points out the amount of people who have the Norman king, William the Conqueror, as their ancestor, I am one of them. I find it really annoying when people pooh pooh this connection by pointing out that there are hundreds of thousands of people in the same position - as if we don't realise that!

The point of genealogy is the study of YOUR family tree, not the 33,554,29 others, and along the way finding out about the lives your ancestors lived, the events of their lives and their experiences, all of which made you who you are today.

If you've ever watched Who Do You Think You Are, then you will have seen how all of the celebrities featured become very attached to the ancestor they are studying, many brought to tears. I know the feeling. It doesn't matter that your lace maker, mine worker, sailor, noble or king also belongs to others, a tiny bit of him or her belongs to you, so cherish it.

You can read about my family connections on my website at
Meandering Through Time - Home (weebly.com)

My family illustrations are by my daughter Alice.
alicepovey.myportfolio.com/the-family-tree

0 Comments

Family History: The Mohun and de Tracy Families.

29/12/2016

2 Comments

While researching my medieval family history I have found numerous examples of the loss of reputation, land and
wealth - all that has taken one generation to accumulate, taken away by the next. The de Tracy and the Mohun family are
just one example. During the reign of King Stephen, the ancestors of William de Tracy, one of the murderers of Thomas Becket, feature in my family history, they benefited from the downfall of my ancestors, the Mohuns.

The de Tracy's held at least two baronies in Devon, that of Barnstaple and Bradninch. The Mohuns held the barony of Dunster
in Somerset.

For his part in an uprising in 1139, William Mohun has gone down in history as a man both hated and feared by the
population of the West Country, most of Williams ‘bad press’ appears in the ‘Gesta Stephani’ or ‘The Acts of Stephen’ a
12th century study of English history. According to this work, Mohun and other West Country rebels, ravaged the country
in order to obstruct the king.

He (King Stephen) also gave orders to Henry de Tracy, a skilled soldier, oft approved in the hazards of war, that acting
n his stead, because he was called away to other business, he should with all promptitude and diligence bestir himself
against the enemy. Henry therefore, in the Kings absence, set forth from Barnstaple, a town belonging to him and
enjoying privileges granted to him by the king, and made vigorous and determined attacks on his foes, so that he not
only restrained their wonted sallies and the unbridled, marauding raids in the neighbourhood, but also captured a hundred
and four horsemen in on cavalry encounter. At length, he so reduced and humbled William (Mohun) that he was able
to abandon further hostilities against him and to leave the country more peaceful and free from such disturbance"

My ancestor died in obscurity, and his family suffered as a direct result of the loss of 104 of his knights to Henry de Tracy.
As Mohun’s disgrace left the next generation to suffer the consequences of his actions, the De Tracy family were, for
a generation at least, rising stars, but like the Mohuns, the de Tracys too fell out of royal favour, William de Tracy, as we
have seen in a previous post, was one of the four men who had heard Henry II’s outburst "Will no one rid me of this t
urbulent priest?’ and then had gone on to murder Becket at Canterbury Cathedral, as a result the De Tracy lands in Devon
were forfeited to the crown.