James W. Growden Award

This item from an Alaskan newspaper mentions the James W. Growden award.

Fairbanks Daily News-Miner – entry Lathrop honors top students =:

At the Lathrop Celebration of Excellence awards ceremony Wednesday night, Keegan Severns received the James W. Growden Award, which goes to the top student athlete at the high school.

In recent years, former Lathrop basketball coach Joe Tremarello has made the presentation, including a description of Growden’s achievements. Growden was a star Fairbanks athlete in the 1950s who became a coach in Valdez. He died, along with his two sons, in the 1964 earthquake.

I believe there is also a Growden Memorial Park in Alaska, presumably also named after him.

James Wilson Growden was born in 1935, the youngest son of William Nelson Growden. James was my fourth cousin. I believe that his daughter Ronda survived (it was not the earthquake that killed James and his sons, but they had gone down to the harbour to watch the fishing boats land their catches, and were drowned by the resulting tsnunami).

William Nelson Growden was born in Tennessee, and worked in government service in Alaska. He was the son of Arthur Matthew Growden, who was born in Dunedin, New Zealand. Much of this information I got from Monica Louise Deragowski of New Orleans, who was a first cousin of James Wilson Growden, and was very interested in the family history, and corresponded with Growdens all over the world. I’ve been trying to continue her work, and see if I can find links between all the Growden families, so I’m very interested in news items, like the one above, that mention the Growden family history.

Research at the LDS Family History Centre

Val is on leave and last Friday we went to Johannesburg and did some research in the LDS Family History Centre in Parktown.  One of the things I always enjoy when going to the LDS Family Centre is the walk through the garden between the car park and the reading room. It is a pleasant place with ponds and lots of shady trees, and is especially enjoyable on hot summer days.

Garden at the LDS Family History Centre

Val was checking Methodist records from the Cape Colony, looking for the Stewardson and Morris families of Damaraland (now part of Namibia), who were said to have had Cape connections, and to have been Methodist missionaries.

I (Steve) was looking at microfilms of the parish registers of Lancaster, Lancashire, England, where the Cottam and Bagot families came from. I managed to find a fair number of entries relating to the siblings of my great-great-great grandmother, Maragaret Bagot, who married Richard Cottam in Lancaster in 1835, and I’ve been reconstructing the families from the parish records.

We also met Gwyneth Thomas there, who is indirectly linked to the Stewardson family through the Gunning family of Walvis Bay — John William Gunning married Charlotte Caroline Stewardson (sister of Val’s great great grandmother Kate Stewardson who married Fred Green) exactly 135 years ago today — they were married at Omaruru on 13 April 1875. Gwyneth Thomas is descended from John William Gunning’s younger sister Sarah Petronella Gunning (1845-1930) who married Thomas William Thomas in Cape Town.

We’ve been trying to exchange GEDCOM files with Gwyneth, but though hers reached us OK, ours seems to get mangled in the transmission, and ends up unreadable.

MyHeritage.com — another scam site?

I keep getting messages from MyHeritage.com, saying that there are SmartMatches for my family tree, or that various people want access to my tree.

When I go to their site, however, I cannot do anything about these, because I get this message:

Your family tree has 10,592 people. This exceeds the Basic subscription plan of your family site.

In order for your family tree to display all people, you must upgrade the site plan.

We have an Easter special: 30% discount on our Premium plan! But hurry up, this offer expires very soon.

Now I never subscribed to their site, with a basic plan or any other. I did not enter those 10 592 people on their site, so if it “exceeds” their basic plan, that is their problem, not mine.

They never asked me for my permission to put their data on their site, yet they seem to have done so, and now want me to pay them to have access to my own data, and to respond to the 19 other people who have asked my permission to access it because they think it matches something in their family tree.

There seems to be something unethical about this whole operation, in fact it seems to be yet another genealogy scam.

They stole my data without my permission, and now they want me to pay them to access it, or to give other people access to it.

Bagots of Lancaster

The past few weeks have been pretty busy with other things, and so not much time for family history. Our son Simon got a new job in Johannesburg, doing computer animation, which is what he’s really been wanting to do for a long time, and until he found a place to stay there at the beginning of the week we had to take him there and bring him home again, and in between I managed to get in some research time in various archives and libraries.

I was looking through a microfilm of the parish registers of St John’s, Lancaster, looking for Cottam, Bagot and Mashiter and related families, and found a number of Bagot entries, and then began sorting them into families, and found that several of them are linked to ours.

So we have John Bagot who married Dorothy Mashiter in Lancaster in 1798, and so far we’ve found six children for them: Nancy, William, Sarah, John, Margaret and Robert. John Bagot the elder was apparently a publican. Margaret married Richard Cottam and was my great great great grandmother.

The surname was spelt in various ways in the records, Bagot or Bagott mostly, though in the end most of them seemed to settle for Bagot.

We’ve managed to find children for William, John and Margaret.

William Bagot married Ann Wooliscroft, who was originally from Derbyshire, in 1823, and we’ve found six childfren for them, though there may have been more. We’ve found marriages and children for two of their boys, Henry and John Thomas. Two of the three girls appear not to have married.

John Bagot, son of John Bagot and Margaret Mashiter, was a watchmaker, and he married Isabella of Oxcliffe (where the Cottams seem to have come from). I’ve discovered four of their children, though there’s a bit of confusion about which of the grandchildre4n belongs to which.

And then there is the mysterious Mary Cottam Bagot, born in Lancaster in 1838, who was staying as a visitor with a Cottam family at Scotforth in the 1851 census. She seems to suggest that there were more links between the Bagot and the Cottam families than Margaret who married Richard, but until I can find her parents it’s hard to say what it was. Perhaps I’ll have to save up to buy her birth certificate!

Most popular blog posts of the year

These were the most popular posts and pages on this blog

2009-01-01 to Today

Title	Views
Geocities Genealogy Pages	686
Geni.com — a flawed site	342
Families	339
Mysterious family and place names	209
The Hannan family	153
Childhood memories: Ingogo 1948	130
Growdens visit Athenian Krewe	129
Altavista still better than Google for g	126
Dead at my age	119
Germans in the Eastern Cape	114
FreeCen and researching Cornwall familie	113
About this Blog	112
In Durban – visiting relatives and resea	94
In Pietermaritzburg	90
Death of Canadian author Mollie Gillen	90
Tombstone Tuesday: earliest Sandercock	89
Software for family historians, biograph	82
Tombstone Tuesday: John and Mary Stooke	73
Tombstone Tuesday: Greenaways in Blislan	65
William Park of Bath, Belfast and Quebec	64

Disk crash and lost e-mail

I’ve had quite a lot of computer problems recently, including a dying hard disk. I won’t go into the details here — if you really want to know you can read them on my general blog at Notes from underground: Frustrating computers.

I managed to replace the dying disk drive with a new and bigger one, and restore backed-up data to it, but lost most of my e-mail for the last three months, from 1 September to 7 December, including messages in my “to-reply” folder.

I didn’t lose anything in my family history data files and notes, as I back those up and transfer them every day to my laptop computer, so the biggest loss is the e-mail, and in family history most of it relates to the Sandercock family, as we started the Sandercock mailing list in October. Most of the list mail is accessible on the web, but some people sent me things privately. So if you sent me something and were expecting a reply, and don’t receive one, please, if possible send a copy of your original message, or at least a reminder.

I also received something on the Descendants of Edward Sandercock and Elizabeth Higgs from an anonymous correspondent. It had quite a lot of new material, which I have entered into the family file, but am unable to attribute it to any source, because I no longer have the original e-mail.

Cooperative family history

Last year we started a family history Wiki, in the hope that it might make it easier to cooperate with others in gathering family history. The Wiki format, which has been so successful in compiling Wikipedia, one of the most useful encyclopedias the world has ever seen, seems ideal for family history, where members of families all over the world  can contribute different parts of the family story.

Daily page views of our Family Wiki 2008i

We began the family wiki in May 2008, and it seems to have attracted plenty of visitors right from the start — more than this blog, in fact. I thought we might get 2-3 visits a day, perhaps 40-50 a month, but it has been quite a lot more than that, rarely dropping below 25 page views a day.

Daily visitors in 2008

Since each visitor usually looks at more than one page, the actual number of visitors is also quite interesting. It seems that it has rarely dropped below 20 visitors a day.

OK, not everyone who visits the site is related. Some may see a surname that they are interested in, but find that it is a different branch of the family, especially with common surnames. They might come, look at the index and a couple of pages, and see there is nothing connected with them, and leave again.

Edits and Editors - 2009

That is rather discouraging.

You can see how discouraging it is by seeing the number of page edits, which has dropped since it started. Also the number of editors is revealing. Only one other person has contributed anything to the pages, and I’ve had to write all the rest myself. The essence of a wiki is that it is cooperative, and many people contribute something to the full story, but that doesn’t seem to be happening. But surely some of the people who visit find a family that is connected to theirs, and could contribute something to the story. And only two left messages.

There is also the question of where visitors come from.

Where visitors came from - 2008

Most of our families were originally from the UK and Canada, and some are from Germany. Some were Huguenots who went from France to Prussia in the 17th century, and spread from there to other parts of the world. The recent generations are in Southern Africa, but we also have others in places like Australia, New Zealand and the USA.

Most visitors are from the USA, probably because more people there have internet access than those in other places. But there are relatively few from some of the countries where most members of our families came from or are living now.

So if you go to our family Wiki and find you are connected to any of the families there, please consider contributing something, however small. Ask if you can become an editor — if you can show you are related, we’ll make you one right away. And add something to one of the pages — an anecdote, an extract from a will, whatever. It doesn’t have to be perfect — that’s the beauty of a wiki. Someone else can polish what you write, and one story sparks off another memory, so someone else can expand it and put it in its context, and that way we all benefit.It can be a legend, a rumour, a story you were told, a black sheep in the family. If it’s a legend or a rumour, just label it as such — those things too are part of the family history.

Of course if we are sixth cousins we’ll have a relatively small proportion of our families in common. So what do you do if you want to write something about one of your relatives who isn’t related to us? Why, start your own family wiki, of course, it’s quite easy to do, and then we can link them for the common relatives.

So please, don’t just be a leech, sucking information from web sites without giving anything in return. You can learn lots of things from the web, but you can also pass on sometrhing of what you have learned so that others can benefit. Please visit our family wiki, but if you are related, please contribute something as well.

Sandercock family forum

We started the Sandercock/Saundercock family history forum for people of Sandercock descent in October, and by the end of the month we have had some very useful discussuions.

Several members have been helped to make new family connections, or to solve mysteries with existing connections.

There are now 15 members, representing several different branches of the Sandercock families.

If you haven’t yet joined, please respond to this invitation to do so, and pass on the invitation to others who may be interested. The forum is open to anyone with the name of Sandercock, Saundercock and vatiants, or who is descended from Sandercocks, or married to someone descended from them.

To join, just send an e-mail message to:

sandercock-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

or visit the web page for the group at:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/sandercock/

Group Email Addresses
Post message: sandercock@yahoogroups.com
Subscribe: sandercock-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
Unsubscribe: sandercock-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
List owner: sandercock-owner@yahoogroups.com

The Sandercock family seems to have originated on the Cornwall-Devon border in south-western England, and have spread from there down and around Bodmin Moor. Some of the towns where the family has been established are St Gennys, Poundstock, and Jacobstow in north-eastern Cornwall; Altarnun, Launceston and neighbouring towns in Eastern Cornwall; Cardinham, Braddock, St Tudy and St Teeth on the south and west of Bodmin Moor, and various towns across the border in Devon.

Sander is said to be a nickname for Alexander, and so Sandercock probably originated as meaning “son of Alexander” — Sanderson is another name with a similar derivation. We hope by pooling our resouces, to track the various families back to the original hypothetical Alexander, though of course there is always the possibility that there were several unrelated ones whose children were given the epithet Sandercock.

More on connecting Sandercock families

Did you know that Daniel Sandercock is one of the top ten Twitterers in Thailand?

I didn’t, until I read this: Top 10 Twitter Users With Max. Number of Followers From Different Countries though I did a double-take when I discovered that it scored Scotland and the United Kingdom separately. Obviously Scotland’s early release of the guy convicted of the Lockerbie plane bombing seems to have made a bigger impact than anyone suspected.

My concern is slightly different, however — I’m not so much interested in how many people follw Dan Sandercock on Twitter as in how many Sandercocks and people from Sandercock-related families communicate with each other.

I checked through some of my old Sandercock crorrespondence, and found that mail to a lot of people was bouncing. Research web sites that had been set up in the past no longer exist, and it all seems to be sliding into entropy, or oblivion, or something.

So I took the plunge and set up another forum cum website for people from Sandercock and Saundercock and other related families to communicate with each other, and I hope they will. That’s quite a lot of people. All my Growden and Growdon relations, for example, are descended from William Sandercock and Mary Verran of Cardinham in Cornwall. There are lots of Growdens who are not related to Sandercocks, of course, but all my lot are.

So if you have Sandercock (or Saundercock) family links have a look at the new Sandercock family forum, and start communicating. In order to join in fully you will need to explain your Sandercock links — you need to be descended from one, or married to one, or married to a descendant.

Connecting the Sandercock families

I looked at some old files and found a copy of a New Zealand marriage certificate that had been sent by Harvey and Jan Saundercock. It was for William Thomas Sandercock and Elizabeth Harker, who were married in the Wesleyan Church in Pitt Street, Auckland on 12 May 1887. William’s parents were listed as Thomas Sandercock and Elizabeth Smale.

I checked in the records I had recently entered, to see if I could find their family in England, and it seemed that the parents were actually Thomas Sandercock and Ellen (not Elizabeth) Smale of Egloskerry, and managed to get several generations of the family linked. The Egloskerry Sandercocks don’t seem to be related to us, but at least that eliminates their family members from our search. The William Thomas Sandercock in New Zealand had a son Raymond, and if we can find them, his descendants may be interested, so if this is your branch of the Sandercocks, please leave a comment, and I can send you what I have managed to link so far.

Most of the Sandercocks seem to come from north-Eastern Cornwall. There’s quite a big bunch from the St Gennys-Poundstock area, and another from Tintagel. The ones I was looking at today were from Egloskerry. Ours are from Cardinham, with their earliest ancestors being William Sandercock and Mary Verran. There’s a picture of their gravestone in an earlier post in this blog. Several people have been trying to collect them and sort them out into families, including Alan Sandercott in Canada. Maybe in the end we’ll find links between these different groups.