Writing Realm.com

and this is me!

Mostly Norman stock, I've discovered. 

There are now over 4000 names on my tree - the main ones being Poulton, Bouvier, Strange, and Greenman. Skull, Cole, Dixon, and Pinnell are also well-represented. The London names are largely Huguenot in origin - Bouvier, Marchant, Landon, Ferre, Poignat and Buvorley. The Bouvier line starts with Pierre. Not sure whether he was born in France or England, but he is definately Huguenot. He became a silk weaver and his house apparently still stands. My mother's line descends down from him, through various East End families resident in Bethnal Green, Spitalfields and Mile End (Bow). Jack the Ripper haunted the area where my ancestors lived at the time they lived there. More recently, the stadium for the 2012 Olympics is to be built in the vicinity.

Some of the Wiltshire folk - my 28x grandparents, I've recently discovered - Walter d' Evereaux and Sybil de Chaworth, built Bradenstoke Priory in 1142. The Priory still exists, but it is sitting in a warehouse somewhere in the United States! William Randulph Hearst bought it and shipped it over the Atlantic, intending to rebuild it on his American property. However, he never got around to it. There is a petition out to restore the Priory to its original location. The first Poulton (Henry) that I can trace lived in Bradenstoke in 1730. His daughter-in-law, Patience Strange, is directly related to the d'Evereaux clan.

The Ames, Dunsters, Fuggles, Elgars and Saxtons are from Kent and Sussex. The Higtons, Richards and associated families are from Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire.

I am still trying to get back into my Suffolk line, which comprises of names like Powell, Young and Scarlett (possibly Keeble as well) - all from around the Ipswich/Woodbridge area.

Bradenstoke village, near Lyneham, Wiltshire.

    Curious Beastie, Moreton-in-Marsh, Gloucestershire Cotswolds.                                                                                                                                                             

I've also joined National Geographic's Genographic Project. This explores one's deep ancestry by testing DNA and I've just received the results of my mtDNA analysis. No real surprises - I'm mtDNA haplogroup H, which is the most common mtDNA haplogroup for Europe.  According to the 'Seven Daughters of Eve' analogy, H stands for Helena. Look at this site for an overview. I am, incidentally, only one mutation removed from the CRS.

If anyone has an interest in this tree, please e-mail me here and I'll do my best to help. I have a Gedcom available. Most of the information I have collated is freely available on the LDS website and other internet sites. While I have done my best to verify my information, I encourage other researchers to do the same.

Other sites of interest are Rootsweb (on the Ancestry site, but a free resource), Us Poultons, FreeBMD and Genes Reunited (which has a free component, but is much more useful when one subscribes to it - if only for six months).