There are a great many sources for information about your family and genealogical advice. If you’re searching a little further afield than Dorset, then the Somerset and Dorset Family History Society might be able to help…
—
When asked to write a blog for the DHC on the collection of pedigrees held at the Somerset & Dorset Family History Society I decided to ask the question that has been vexing me for sometime: What’s the difference between a pedigree and a family tree? I discovered that a pedigree and a family tree can mean the same thing, or they can be different depending upon context. That is, people can and do use the words interchangeably. Perhaps originally a pedigree may have included only the people that you are directly descended from and not all the cousins and aunts and once you started adding all the others to your pedigree it morphs into a family tree – is this a correct assumption? Perhaps it is or maybe not so let us proceed.
What might you discover if you searched amongst the pedigrees donated to the Society over the last 40+ years held at the Research Centre in Yeovil? Some you will find are in beautifully presented, meticulously researched printed books. Some will be painstakingly drawn out and rolled up with others consisting of interesting sets of papers, handwritten or typed, containing any amount of fascinating information. There is a data-base that you can search to see if your family name is hidden somewhere amongst the pedigrees or you can find others with no connections to your own family at all but who, none-the-less, have interesting stories to tell.
Let us look at one-such – the pedigree for ‘Browne of Frampton Dorset and Westminster’ is magnificent and in this case size matters as it is nearly a whopping two-meters long and nearly half as wide. Packed with approaching 300 people many of them with well known Dorset names and there amongst them is Rear-Admiral Sir John Browne 1559-1627. Also donated to the Research Centre but this time to the library is a book entitled The Silk Admiral – A Tale of Old Melcombe by A Jackson Brown M. B. E. published in 1968. This absorbing tale lifts the Rear-Admiral right off the page of his pedigree and fleshes him out in novel format creating an enjoyable read. Meanwhile at the Dorset History Centre there is much more that can be discovered about him by searching the archive and his portrait, attributed to Robert Peake, is in the Dorset Museum.
There must be many such accounts waiting to be discovered hidden amongst the over 3,500 sets of pedigrees in this unique collection.
For more information please go to:- sdfhs.org or email, sdfhs@btconnect.com
—
This was a guest blog written on behalf of Somerset and Dorset Family History Society by Barbara Elsmore.