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Sometimes, only a professional can help put
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Our own researchOur own family tree hasn't had the Ancestrography treatment yet, but we're working on it. If you share some of the names in your own family history Peter would be interested in hearing from you via Ancestrography.
After solving an indexing error in the 1901 census on Ancestry.com, it was fairly easy to trace the Parrys back to an Owen Parry living at Penrhiw in the parish of Llanbeulan (actually just outside Bryngwran but the ancient church, dedicated to Saint Paulinus, was out in the countryside, and is now managed by the Friends of Friendless Churches). The Peters and Owens of Anglesey We have traced the Peters family back to a Rowland Peter of Ffynnon fair, Carreglefn. His son John (1817-1868) lived at Pant y coli, Carreglefn, but went to the ancient church of St Pabo for family baptisms, marriages and burials (Pabo had been a Dark Age celtic king in the Peak District and south Pennines who retired to Anglesey as a hermit). According to family tradition, John Peter's son Harry married a witch, who painted her face and was a bad wife and consequently they never really settled down, prospered or got a farm of their own. She was Jane the daughter of Henry Owen of Pant y gwydd. The Owens came from Llanfflewyn and were all horse breakers. Harry and Jane's eldest son, John Peters, left Anglesey and settled in Caernarfon where he was well respected as an Alderman.
The Spencers have been traced back to Charles Spencer of Long Crendon (1765-1825), but no further, although there is a family legend about a cattle drover from Stony Stratford that might just hold some truth. Like another family of the same name, the Spencers all had red hair, unusual in the home counties. But such speculation is clutching at straws and not good genealogy! Some allusions to the Allcock family history were made by Samuel's daughter Florence, a novelist, in her fanciful and romanticised book Facts and Fiction (1931). There are some even better stories in circulation among the Allcocks, including a lost West Indian fortune in Chancery, and a truly romantic conversion to underground Roman Catholicism for love of a girl named Penelope Rainbow. On the subject of storytellers, Fin Spencer's mother was a Bunyan, and her ancestry has verifiably been traced back to the brother of John Bunyan the dreamer of Pilgrim's Progress.
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John
Foden (1868-1938) and Matilda Knowles (1862-1949) with their
family in Buxton in about 1905. John, a gardener at the Buxton
Pavilion Gardens, had been born on the Mottram Hall estate in
Cheshire where his father was the wheelwright and his mother the
laundress. Peter has researched this family back to Joseph
Foden, a wheelwright at Snelson near Chelford who died in 1805.
Snelson is very close to the lost mediaeval settlement of Foden
in Peover Superior parish, from which all the English Fodens
inherit their surname.
Finemore
and Sarah Jane Spencer, photographed around 1910. Fin was a
needlemaker in Redditch, one of the many who moved from the
attractive village of Long Crendon, Buckinghamshire, home of
needlemaking as a cottage industry, to the new industrial centre
in the midlands. Fin and Jen had a lot in common; both were
nonconformists, both had lost their fathers (his had abandoned
his wife and family; hers had died), and both had industrialist
cousins (Jen's cousin was Samuel Allcock the fishing tackle
manufacturer).
