On January 1, 1999 I began researching my family history which was both a New Year's resolution and what I choose to do for my Young Women's in Excellence project. It is a goal that has become part of me and who I am - The Family Genealogist - and I love it! I love researching my own family history and the opportunities I have had to help others.
I started with very little information but as I talked with family members, some for the first time, I had enough information to start researching records. I was able to find quite a bit of information relatively quickly and over the past 14 years I have been able to accumulate 20,846 names of people I am related to. I have also had the opportunity to visit several grave sites, streets, towns and villages where my ancestors have lived in England, Scotland and Southern Manitoba. Now I just need to go to Germany, and the old German-Russian parts of Poland, Russia and Ukraine.
More recently I have had more success with finding individuals distantly related to me through descendency research and connecting with other distant relatives via the Internet. While putting together my list of 30 things I included "find a new ancestor", meaning a Great-something grandparent, because although I have hit many brick walls I was confident that I could break one down somewhere.
As the New Year started and I reflected on past New Year's resolutions and goals this one was brought to mind as well as the goal I had included on my list and decided to get to work. I know that the
Family Search site continues to add more records as they are indexed so I decided to start by going through each ancestor on
My Family Tree and see if I could connect them to any other records. I stopped at a set of 7th Great Grandparents, William Clacy and Ann Alright whose marriage record I had found last year; which took place on February 7, 1704 in Wokingham, Berkshire, England. Looking at Ann Alright I could see that another user had added her parents as Thomas and Elizabeth Alright from Arborfield. However, it seemed to me in looking at their children that there was actually two families that had been combined. Not that it would be impossible for them to have 15 children or two or more with the same name but it would be to have children a few months apart. Although, sometimes babies were baptized later as children, I didn't think it likely in this case.
I then spent several hours searching baptismal, marriage and burial records of Alrights, Allrights, Alwrights, and Allwrights in the county of Berkshire in that time period and sorting them into families. I found that there was indeed two families of Thomas and Elizabeth Alrights, both living in Arborfield, infact most of the Alright's and variations were found in the village of Arborfield. The
Arborfield local History website also lists the family name as one of the most common in the village; check out the
Allright page for some interesting information on the family. It was neat seeing the names of the various villages in Berkshire as I have been there. I went to England in 2001 and visited the nearby village of Binfield where several generations of my Johnson ancestors lived.
Back to my research, both families of Thomas and Elizabeth Alrights had an Ann and in order to determine which one was mine I made what I will call an educated guess ... was Elizabeth in her early 40s when her last child was born or mid 50s? I'll say that Ann Alright, the wife of William Clacy was baptized January 7, 1682 in Arborfield.
Through the
Berkshire records I searched I was also able to find the parents of Thomas Alright/Alwright. Francis Alwright and Mary Turville and the Fathers of both Francis and Mary, James Alright and Richard Turville. I have now added over 100 years and six ancestors to this branch of my family tree!
