We have a few new members since the last journal. Jenny Whitmore has joined even though she has no ancestral link to our names. Her interest stems from the fact that she lives in a house called ’Twyford’ that was once owned by William Sewell (1748-1832), son of the more famous Sir Thomas Sewell (1718-1784) who was Master of the Rolls 1764-1784, the second highest legal position in the country. See www.sole.org.uk/sirthom.htm for an article on Sir Thomas and his descendants. The appointment came as a surprise to all, including Thomas himself, but he held the position for twenty years. William died without issue and the house was then handed down through various members of the family.

We have some more details on this family as it is one of the biggest from London (ESSldnC) and could possibly be related to some of the Sewell trees that come out of India as various members of the family went there and did not seem to return. In addition when I was clearing some of the papers I inherited from Diana Kennedy I found a folder entitled ‘Sir Tomas Sewell’ which contains some interesting documents some of which I hope to pass on to Jenny.

I can also welcome Susan Davies from Australia who I hope to be able to assist in the near future.

I have continued with my work on the Sewell data and I can now reports that all the gedcoms are now cleaned and everyone in them has been assigned a unique number that will be of use going forward. My current project is twofold. First I am making sure than no duplicates exist in the trees and while doing this I have already deleted 10 trees from the records. These have mainly been from London where someone suddenly appears there but was detailed in their original country tree.

The second is to link all names in the 1881 census with the gedcoms. I have taken a download of all the gedcoms, merged them and I am now comparing this data with the 1881 census. Just to give you some idea of how much data we have the combined output from our records stands at just over 22 thousand entries! The 1881 census has about six thousand entries but it is clear from the work I have already done that many people in that census are missing from our data. I intend to add them and then move onto other data sources like the BMD and parish records that I hope will add to our data sources. 

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