The following issues are explained:
In April 1967, Gail Henderson wrote:
"I have been interested in genealogy for some time. However I am finding that mere names and dates, etc. are not nearly as fascinating as old letters, photos and, best still, family secrets and tales of my ancestors".
80 years earlier, in September 1886, her great-great-uncle Robert Crawford wrote:
"There are many members of our somewhat numerous family who are desirous to possess all the information they can obtain concerning not only their living relatives, but also as to the ancestors from whom they are descended; and it is by printing this contribution to family history that I can alone comply with their wishes".
These pages are intended to carry on the family history in this same spirit.
This site was started in March 2000 and, with the benefit of several years experience, will evidently not be completed in my lifetime. It was difficult to know whether to go for "breadth" or "depth". In the event, there is a mixture, with a few people or branches of the family having a great deal of associated material, whilst others are currently recorded with the bare minimum of information. Relatively few of the planned, associated document images and family pictures have yet been transferred to the site. There is a huge volume of paper based information (see Sources of Information below) and, whilst some branches of the family have been completely researched and recorded in this Web Site, as far as surviving records go, others still entail years of work.
This site is based on a single record (or HTML page) for each person, and is designed for speed of navigation, so that on the primary pages, graphics are kept to a minimum (possibly just a small photo).
A logical (but somewhat arbitrary) naming convention has been used for each page; it is not necessary to know what it is, but knowing this may help a viewer to keep track of what generation they are at. A typical page has a name like "m97mh1.html". The first three characters represent the generation. Starting with the generation born around the 1910s or 1920s, the prefix is "p00", their children "p01", their grandchildren "p02", etc. This is an arbitrary starting point; the "p" standing for "plus". Going back to their parents, the prefix is "m99", their grandparents "m98", their great-grandparents "m97", etc. The "m" stands for "minus". The second part of the name, "mh1" in our example, consists of the person's initials with a suffix, normally 1 (but 2, 3, etc if two or more people in the same generation happen to have the same initials). This naming convention allows the family history to be extended backwards, forwards or sideways for a large number of generations.
Sometimes it is necessary to have another document, a picture sheet (ie group of photographs) or a map attached to a particular person's record. Based on our example above, it would be named "gdm97mh1d01.html" or "gpm97mh1p01.html" or "gmm97mh1m01.html"; meaning that it is Document 1 or Picture Sheet 1 or Map 1, associated with the person in the record "m97mh1". The first letter "g" identifies the item as being in the gallery; the second letter, which can be d or p or m, identifies it as a document, picture or map. These attached documents are used when there are pictures or a lot of text which would slow down the normal browsing of the records. Where such material is associated with several people, its name is a more general one.
In designing this Site, it was realised that there could sometimes be a great many links to one particular page and in situations where a RETURN Button is inappropriate, a Navigation Bar at the foot of the page can be used to take you to one of about five familiar menu pages.
Navigation is based on:
One WARNING. If you bookmark specific, detailed pages, there is no guarantee that their URLs will not change. I can promise not to change the URLs of the key menu pages, but when there are major changes to a page, it is often necessary to change the URL or even break the page into two or more pages.
This site makes use of a number of fonts which are common to both Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh, including Verdana (the default) and Georgia. It also uses web fonts (in WOFF format) when special type styles are required.
Prof Robert Crawford M.A. published the pamphlet "The Crawfords of Donegal" in 1886, with a new and revised edition in 1897. This carried on the genealogical work that his father had done. This publication is now of immense value as so many of the Irish Records were destroyed in the Civil War in 1922. The work forms the basis of information about the Crawfords (or Crawfurds) going back to about 1140 in Scotland, with their subsequent settlement in Ireland (the Plantation of Ulster in 1610). The pamphlet also details the marriage into the female line of the Crawfords by a Cochrane in 1829.
Gail Henderson acquired various family records and was subsequently active in the 1960s in researching the Cochranes, Kincaids and Styles (in Co. Donegal, Ireland), the Redmans (in Brighton, England), the Francklings (in East London) and the Powells (in London and then Taunton, Somerset, England); obtaining relevant birth, marriage and death certificates, writing letters to distant relatives and getting verbal accounts from elderly relatives. Unfortunately, her collection of certificates has disappeared; but Gail's resulting notes and charts remain, as does an important Cochrane Family Tree, produced in the late 1800s, going back to 1690. In 2001, Richard Crawley kindly provided trees on the more recent Cochrane lines.
Lois Moriarty (née Redman) had an enormous collection of family records and photographs and very generously gave these to me in about 2004.
A Family Tree of the Hendersons was compiled in 1976 (signed "SCGL 1/76"; Stanley Lambert - now deceased) and this traces the Hendersons back to two marriages in Abbotshall, Fife, Scotland. William Henderson to Mary Syme in 1771 and John Hally to Margaret Henderson in 1792. History does not reveal whether William Henderson and Margaret Henderson were related (possibly cousins); only that they married within 21 years of each other in the same village. Two generations later, their descendants married in 1850 (Archibald Henderson to Helen Hally). With the records of the General Register Office for Scotland being available online, the main lines of this tree have now been checked and no errors have been found; suggesting that "SCGL" was using the old parish records for Fife, Scotland.
Extensive material is available on the Cardens and Redmans in Brighton, at both the East and West Sussex Record Offices (particularly the St Nicholas Parish Registers and Bishops' Transcripts going back to about 1558). In addition, Arthur Carden's book on the "Cardens of Brighton" is available to purchase from Lulu.
The UK Census data from 1841 to 1911 and Irish Census data for 1901 and 1911 have provided valuable resources.
Most of the records from the above sources have now been entered into a database (Personal Ancestral File), which currently contains the details of over 1,500 people. As quite a few are distant cousins, etc, the intention is to include only the most closely related lines in the main Web pages. If anyone is interested in more details of a particular branch of the family, please contact me by email, and I will try to help. However, I shall not be making any large GEDCOM files available anywhere on the internet until I have completed much more research.
I may be contacted at:
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for family history matters. |
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for technical, web-site issues. |
Comments or questions are always welcome.
The language used is standard English, not american English. Dates are normally written in full (eg "25th December 1876") to avoid ambiguity. If any dates have inadvertently been written as 25/12/1876, the standard European convention of DAY, MONTH, YEAR will have been used.
A GLOSSARY is available (linked to, either from here or from the Home Page). In some cases, a place name provides an additional link to a map or a photograph.
Maps, Pictures and Documents are listed in the following linked pages. In order to achieve rapid navigation, the subsequent large files are loaded, only when clicked.
| c1956 | "circa" - the date is generally documented as 1956 but there may be an error of a year or so. |
| a1956 | "about" - possibly from a verbal source, the date is generally thought to be 1956 but there may be an error of a few years. |
| e1956 | "estimated" - an estimate based on some known fact (eg a date of birth estimated from a known marriage date). Not particularly accurate, but it will provide a rough guide; usually within 10 years. |
| (1956-) | thought to be alive. |
| (1956-?) | thought to be dead. |
| (dii) | died in infancy. |