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Research Back Story 2 - Claudia's Mother's Family

1/8/2013

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Claudia's Maternal Main Surnames (Direct Line):
ANDREW, and HOPGOOD, GRIGG, CORNISH, BURNARD, ADAMS, HAMBLY
RICHARDSON, and HARRIS, PACKHAM, RANDALL, PROCTOR, STEVENS, SWEETLOVE, THOMAS
COMPTON, and COATES, JEFFERY, ROBINSON, COSEY, NEWMAN, WHITAKER, CHILDEROY
, HASZARD, SPENCER, LISLE
My earliest memories are of living with my mother, my younger sister, and my maternal ANDREW grandparents in Duncan, BC, Canada.  My father had been killed in a logging accident when I was very small and my mother's parents took us in until I was about 6.  I grew up hearing stories of their life on the family farm in North St Eleanors PEI where my mother and her six siblings were born (in 1941, the farm became part of the RCAF base near Summerside in 1941, but the family didn't move west until after the war). 

My mother's father (Grandpa Andrew ) was a great story teller.  As a young child, the stories I loved best were made up ones about an adventurous bear, eagerly requested while sitting on his lap.  Of course I now wish that all their family stories, including the fictitious ones, had been recorded, or that I had a better memory!  I treasure the one recording I do have of my Granny Nell Andrew, when I interviewed her in Duncan BC in the 1980s.

My mother's mother, Nell (Richardson) ANDREW had an interest in family, and was the one who kept in contact with relatives, entertained visiting relatives, helped nurse sick family and relatives, and loved family history.  I was told (by one of my aunts I think) that she and her sister Lulu could talk for hours about family news and history.  Granny passed down her family notes to her son Alan, who in the 1980s passed their package of hand-written charts, correspondence, typed transcripts and booklets on to me (I had been asking a lot of questions).  Part of their research had itself been passed down from earlier family researchers including Hubert G Compton (Nell's grand-uncle) who liked to write, and who had published his family story in the "Past and Present of Prince Edward Island" published about 1906 in PEI.

Nell's brother-in-law Albert Andrew had also done research on both the ANDREW and COMPTON history.  Both steadfastly believed that our COMPTON line were the "poor cousins", somehow related to the aristocratic Comptons of Wynyates in Warwickshire,  Baron Henry Compton  and his son William Compton, Earl of Northampton.  This connection has never been proved as far as I know, and I think it much more likely that we are connected to another land-owing Compton family from Wiltshire (as now documented in my family tree). 

As far as the ANDREW family history goes, they had been traced back to the town of Kilkhampton in the rugged north east corner of Cornwall England, very close to to the Devon border.  We know that William Andrew married an Honour Grigg there in 1807 but so far we have been unable to push it back further with any certainty, although theories abound.  According to one of Albert Andrew's grandsons, we may be of the "black Andrews", descended from Spanish sailors shipwrecked off the Cornish coast who stayed there and married Cornish women.  Others suggest the Andrews may have come down the west coast of England from Scotland, or perhaps were previously settled in Devon.  The search continues!
For many years I restricted my genealogy "research" to compiling information I could glean from family papers and from what other relatives could tell me.  The 1980s were early days for personal computing, but we had an Apple II computer and I started by writing a program to organize my family information.  I then tried out PAF, free family tree software available free from the LDS church.  I didn't do much genealogy in the 1990s as we were raising our two boys and I returned to the workforce.  But over the years I played with different genealogy programs on my Apple or Mac computers, which usually necessitated reentering the growing amount of family information I had collected.  I liked the computer side of things, but wasn't sure how to go about pushing my maternal lines back further in England in the 1700s and earlier.

It was Christmas 2005 when I decided to take a look on the internet where the amount of information available had really started to increase.  Within an hour I had found an article written by an English COMPTON researcher (following a tip and link on a forum site), and thank goodness I read it to the end where the name Childeroy was mentioned.  It was a life changing moment!  I contacted the author who turned out to be my fifth cousin once removed.  Her research took our Compton line back to the 1500s in Hampshire and Wiltshire, England.   Not long after this I also connected with the wife of a second cousin in eastern Canada (now in PEI), who had been sent a copy of my family tree by my uncle and had been industrially reviewing my Canadian information and correcting it following extensive research in the Charlottetown archives.  I was so thrilled and grateful.  All this serendipity got me jump started on my genealogy again, and I've been researching ever since with a passion. 

While my successes in my other maternal branches haven't yet spanned as many generations as the COMPTON line, I have certainly met some very friendly and helpful researchers and new cousins online in the process, who have helped me to discover a lot more about my maternal family history.  My ANDREW ancestors in the 1700s continue to resist discovery, although a promising working theory is that they came to north-east Cornwall from Devon.  My RICHARDSON ancestors have now been traced back to East Sussex in the 1700s although missing baptism records make some of it a leap of faith.  The further back you go, the more maternal names need investigating, which adds to the excitement.  I also enjoy trying to fill in the side branches in order to find more distant cousins.

My genealogy research has truly turned into an addiction!
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    Authors

    Terry and Claudia Boorman have been interested in their family history since the 1980s.  They live in Victoria BC Canada.

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