Web site update

I used the “fess families” as the basis for my display at the Guild’s AGM in April. The display for the Solihull seminar in February went well (so I thought!) and I gained a few ideas from talking to others there, as well as just from the actual process of producing the display. But that display had been a more general introduction to several aspects of the study so I narrowed it down to concentrate on just the fess families for the AGM display. Having done that, the information I produced should act as the foundation for pages on each of the fess families to go onto the web site. Back in February I also received a copy of the Will of Bishop Edward Archibald Parry, formerly Bishop of Guiana, which I will transcribe. He was the son of Edward Parry, Suffragan Bishop pf Dover, whose tomb at Canterbury can be seen on the “fess families” page on my web site.

Getting the web pages updated is important – they have suffered from the busy-ness of the last few months and don’t even have details of the DNA study or DNA group on them at the moment. The only page I have added recently concerned my grandfather’s “emigration” to Canada. There is more to be added even to that page but the incentive for producing it was hearing about the Ontario Genealogical Society’s annual conference which was being held in London, Ontario. I notified a Canadian researcher about the page, in case there were any opportunities for making it known to people. Nothing came of that but at least it meant I produced the page (sometimes deadlines do work!)

Going back to the Guild’s AGM in April – since it was held down in Devon, I was able to obtain information on Parry events in that county, which I typed up once home. This was an incentive to systematically extract the IGI entries for the county. Tackling the IGI properly is on my “to do” list, but I know from doing Devon that it will be a long job. One of the difficulties with English counties is going to be the number of Perry entries, since they are treated as a variation of Parry on the IGI. Some of the early variants could be even more problematic, since searching for “ap Harry” produces all the “Harry” results. I will perhaps have to work on an exact search for Parry and hope that I can cover all the variants separately. There’s certainly plenty of scope for confusion, especially where there are instances of different surnames that have the same origin and which may be interchangeable in particular time periods - one of the probate Abstracts is that of an Ursula Harry, who then remarried to a Harrison and who also had a son in law, David Parry.

So that's three different surnames which all have an origin derived from “Harry’s son.”