The History Of My Family History Quest

As happens in all families, there is a little bit of oral history floating around (most of it inaccurate), and about 6 years ago I started to try to collect this together. Unfortunately, I left it a bit late to start recording it because the people who could have really been useful, my grandparents, were all deceased. Then, in February 2001 I broke my leg rather badly and was housebound for some time. In order to occupy myself, and because my daughter (then in Year 9, the second year of High School here) was nagging me, I arranged an internet connection which allowed me out into the world. I started digging around for family information and, to my surprise, found that I could actually stumble onto some good stuff.

Then an uncle died, and left a whole stack of old photos (of the Wiltshire part of the family, mostly) that I began to shuffle through and identify. Dad also found two boxes of stuff in the rafters of his shed; photos, clippings, odds-and-sods that my grandparents had collected from the time they met (WW1) and never threw away. That really gave me the impetus to get moving on working out who all these people were.

I went the usual route - Ancestry, GenesReunited, etc. and then came across British Genealogy Forums where the good people were of much assistance. GR started to bear fruit, with Devonshire family contacting me first. Then the Essex mob started to drift in, but very little yet on the Wiltshire lot. All along the Drews were proving elusive.

Then, one day, I had a GR contact from Graham, asking if my great-great aunt Jane Drew might be the same person as his Nan; indeed, she was. Then, a day or so later a lady named Chris left a message for me at British Genealogy. She had been Googling on Edward George DREW and came across a thread of mine in BG; her Nan was Jane Drew, too. So, besides having some information flowing in, I was also able to reunite these cousins. Chris then put me in touch with another cousin of hers, Janet, so suddenly I had 3 third cousins I'd never known about. Those three have recently had a little family get-together in Southampton, and I'll be spending some time with Janet very soon as she is now in Australia on holiday from New Zealand.

With the new information plugged into an expanded GR tree, it wasn't too hard to find some likely Hot Matches on GR, and the rest, as they say, is (family) history. Colin and Des found me, and then over the past month Linda and Mary have opened up a whole new world of Drews. Ann and Kathryn popped up, and Kathryn brought Juliet (the first contact to have been born a Drew) to the party. Michael also appeared, with Louisa Drew in his tree, but not on his direct line. Thelma has lots of Drew names, but they are in Devon. However, she has a Jennifer Tallack that married one of "our" Drew men (my gggrandfather Bennett) and Jennifer's niece Elizabeth (Betsey) Tallack who married one of Jennifer's grandsons, John Nicholls. That couple, and some other family members, migrated in 1854 to Victoria, Australia.

So the past few weeks I have been collating all this new information and merging it all together into one BIG DREW TREE. Time now for sanity checking before I send it out so everyone can see where everyone else fits.

Enough for tonight.