There's lots more information on the
What a funny name! I'd change it if I were him!
| That was my mother's reaction on learning my
new boyfriend's surname. It was a funny name but instead of wanting
to change it, I discovered that the family were quite proud of it. It was
unusual. There weren't any other WINDEATTs around
. . . or so we all thought. Then, twenty-five years later, a Bruce WINDEATT e-mailed from Canada. He had thought he was the only Windeatt around too. Then a Peter WINDEATT e-mailed from Kent. He had been compiling his family tree and had found a lot of other WINDEATTs. I put him in touch with Bruce and they turned out to be second cousins! I never thought I would get interested in genealogy. It seemed a weird hobby. But when Peter sent me the long lists of all the registered WINDEATT births, deaths and marriages, I began to find the puzzle of putting them into families very addictive. |
Scott's family were hazy about their history.
His ancestors seemed to have moved around a lot. And there had been a lot
of fairly early deaths. There wasn't much of an oral family history around
- only that Scott's father thought that the family had originally come
from Ivybridge in Devon. He had once seen a man driving a Lorry marked
Ivybridge and called out "Got any WINDEATTs down there, mate?"
"Tribes of them!" was the amazing answer. Well, I have
traced the WINDEATTs back to Devon and found lots of mysteries on the way
and even more when I got there..
Some of the questions puzzling me are: |
- For information about the origins and history of the surname, please go to the ORIGINS link below (or at the top of the page).
- For information and sample data from each of the family trees, please go to the TREES link below (or at the top of the page).
- Did your family come over with the William the Conqueror? Are you descended from Adam and Eve? If so (or if not), do read Charles Dickens' mickey-take of family history researchers in the first chapter of his novel, Martin Chuzzlewit, available from Great Literature Online!
- For more in the same vein see TRACING BACK TO BIBLICAL ROOTS from Rod Neep (whose web site also includes some very good advice and tutorials about transcribing parish registers).
