Andrewses … Rolleses … Gibsons ... and also Wilsons

                        (AND NOW WADES) ,

especially after -

    Christine had found connections in Stamford with the Wilsons (her paternal grandma's family); quite by chance we parked outside the house (click to see in Gallery) where her great grandfather had been recorded as a boot boy in the 1871 census - so more to follow up on this, which we are in the process of doing via books lent us by Mrs Ivy Price of Barrowden -

KEEP WATCHING THIS SPACE (follow "Read" link below  to see addition about WADES in blue panels) !

Christine has for some years been puzzling out the significance within her father’s family of a letter from America.  It was sent in 1844 by a Gibson to his un-named brother back in Bushy Park, Middlesex, and contains an appeal from the settler to the home bird to come and join him in Oregon, where a measure of grain would go so much further because of the methods of farming adopted by the pioneers. 

That letter has set Christine off on a trail of how the Gibsons relate to the Rolles family, and the Rolles to the Wilsons, a family of Barrowden (Rutland) & Wakerley (Northants), the name of her maternal grandmother’s family .  The trail seems to take us back to Scotland, and many London-area links, back into the early 19th Century, are also starting to appear.  In the process of this, we find we have been steadily feeding money into the coffers of the “Census Online”, by means of all the units of buying-power we began to build up during Vic’s researches into his mother’s Italian ancestors (see next below the article “Minolettis from Cannero to England - an Attempt at History” in the “Family History” section of this site), and which have now become a rewarding regular outlay of our children’s inheritance - but money well spent!

The fruits of all this Gibson-inspired digging will eventually be published on this website - perhaps in  the form of a family-tree and some extracts deciphered from the American epistle.  In the meantime, we leave you with these images, above 1 and above 2 .

 of the letter that sparked it all off, with its criss-cross handwriting designed to get as much on one sheet as possible (including the address), in order to save on postage which in the early 1800s was expensive.

We have since been to Barrowden (Rutland - click for picture ) and Wakerley (just over the Welland in Northants), villages which run into each other, to explore the Wilson connection: so far we have seen a few WADE graves in Barrowden, presumably of the family that married into Wilsons (there are some "... Wade Wilsons" in the records). Our thanks to Ivy Price, a marvellous 93-year-old in Barrowden, for a number of books on the area which Christine in particular is now going to peruse, before we try to trace a Maurice Wade in Stamford, reputably with all the Wade family info.

 In addition to all this, we now have more on the Rolleses, and between Christine, her cousin Jenny and her Auntie Nancy (Christine's dad's youngest & surviving sister), there is a lot of poring over old photos that seem to include Nancy Rolles, Christine's great-grandmother, and (we hope to find by elimination) her husband Josiah Wilson.