Welcome to my Family History

As a child I lived in a flat in the same house that my mother had lived in when she was a girl and the stories that she told about life there before the war and about her father's drapery business intrigued me. My father also talked about his life as a child in Edinburgh but he was selective in the information he gave only mentioning those relatives that were well educated or had a slightly better standard of living. I was left to find out for myself about the coal mining side of his family.

I started my research many years ago with the Thomsons, obtaining the relevant certificates and accessing the census data at a local history centre but did very little else until I moved to Sussex and was able to travel to Worthing library. I then started researching the Lelliott side of my tree using the census, microfiches of the Sussex parish registers and the Worthing directories. My research spread out from there, adding more distant Lelliott relatives until I wondered whether it was possible to put them all together and trace them back to a single family. As a result of this I have a large amount of Lelliott data, over ten separate family trees and a large number of entries from the parish registers which will be added to this site in the future.

Much of the Scottish research has been done online, with an image of an entry in the register being much cheaper than the English certificate. I have also visited Edinburgh and Gladsmuir to find out more and take photographs of where my ancestors lived.

The information is set out here by taking each of my grandparents and followed them back in time and although I was born in London three of my grandparents have their origins in Scotland. The main families that are followed here are the Smiths and Hendrys from The Lothians, Thomsons, originally from the Scottish Boarders and later Angus but by the middle of the 19th century living in London and the Lelliotts from Sussex. I also have an interest in the Dobsons from the Lake District as the families were still visiting each other 80 years after a marriage between them had taken place.

I have tried not only to list names and dates but also, where possible, to add some details about people's lives and especially information about the family businesses which they started.

Details about a woman once she is married will be found on her husband's page.

If a birth, marriage or death has an exact date, the information, unless recent or otherwise stated, will have come from either a certificate or the parish register. If only a quarter or year is recorded the data would have come from the GRO indexes and there is a possibility that it has been applied to the wrong person.

All names in blue on the charts have their own page.

I have done my best to be accurate but please check anything you add to your own tree by going back to the original sources. I apologise in advance for any mistakes. Please let me know of any you find via the contact form.