A Collection of Family Tales 
This page is an index, a list of my family stories some completed and other work in progress. Click on a button and see if my family is your family.
As with many of the towns and villages of the West Country, Braunton’s roots lie in the culture of the Celts. Like other West Country saints such as Gildas and Pyran, Brannock, a Gaelic priest in the household of King Brenckock founded a monastery and a new community on the site of a Saxon church. The Bustaine family have been associated with the village of Brauntion since the middle of the 16th century.
 The Hendley’s manor of Coursehorne can be found in the County of Kent and bordered on its western side by the village of Cranbrook. This family were first and foremost sheep farmers, the grassland sustained the breeding and grazing of sheep who produced quality wool. Most landholders like Gervais made a living from farming alone and subsidised their income from money made in weaving.
Christopher Hunt senior appears to be the progenitor of our family, he was probably born around 1629 in either Totnes or Exeter three years into the reign of Charles I and probably married in 1647/8.
The Lakeman’s have lived in Mevagissey since the beginning of the 17th century and their story begins when Mevagissey’s quay was not peopled with holidaymakers and when there were no houses to be found perched high on the steep slopes of Polkirt Hill
The roots of the Meavy family are embedded in the Dumnonii culture of the West Country, and their lands can be found mentioned in documents dated over thirty years before ​the Norman Conquest.
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Cornwall had grown prosperous from agriculture, unlike today, agriculture was the mainstay of the counties economy, an economy which was based on small farms, most with under one hundred acres of land that specialised in dairy, stock rearing and horticulture. Horses had replaced oxen and winter crops were grown and the potato was the staple diet of the poor.
The Mohuns, pronounced Moon, owned Dunster Castle which proudly stands on what is known locally as The Tor, which is in fact a very steep hill. 
​The arrival of the Normans saw these lands given to William de Mohun who built a timber castle here to keep an eye on the rebellious English in the West Country. It was a motte and bailey castle, the motte being built at the beginning of the twelth century. 
The Purches were seafaring folk, they originate from the Portea in Hampshire and found their way to Cornwall where the family, still bearing this name, can be found. 
​At the time the descendants of the ancient Scoboryo family had arrived in the town of St Columb Major in Cornwall the people of this most westerly county were still pursuing their ancient way of life, they spoke their own distinctive language, celebrated their festivals and listened to the stories of Cornish giants and piskies. 
It is in the small village of Barkby, that lies just south of Syston and four miles south-east of Leicester, that we first meet Susanna Smith.
The roots of the Tosny family are embedded in the formation of Normandy when the Vikings arrived at the mouth of the River Seine in the 9th century. What would become the Duchy of Normandy was created by treaty, following the fall of Charlemagne’s empire, between Viking leader Rollo and the Frankish Charles the Simple. 
The County of Leicestershire was this families home from the beginning of the 19th. In 1874, unaware of the danger a life in the coal mines could bring, the first of the Toon family set forth, pick in hand, to the coal fields of Nottinghamshire.
Like many families of South Staffordshire and Yorkshire the Taylor's lives were solely dependent on a living earned from the iron and coal mines. Miners were paid a pittance and they risked losing their lives every time they went below ground.
It was during that last four years of George II’s reign that the Underwood family could be found in the Leicester village of Coleorton.
It was on the 25th June 1483 that three men were executed for treason at Pontefract Castle in Yorkshire on charges of conspiracy and plotting against Richard, Duke of Gloucester. These men were Anthony, Earl Rivers and Richard Grey, brother and son of Edward IV’s queen Elizabeth Woodville, the third man was Thomas Vaughan, chamberlain to Edward, Prince of Wales.
All works © Andrea Povey 2014. Please do not reproduce without the expressed written consent of Andrea Povey.