Why Family Trees?
It was never my intention to compile a family tree or trees but I found I had to, at least to some extent, in order to understand who was who in the diaries. I did have a bit of a head start as both mum and grandad had done some work on family trees. In particular, in 1999, mum received from Alan Cirket, a professional archivist and family member, a very extensive family tree for the Cirkets, my maternal grandmother’s father’s family who came from Elstow in Bedfordshire and who had lived there for many years. I have supplemented these family trees through my own research.
How Best to Depict Family Trees?
I still have not settled on the best way to record and display these family trees. I have recorded a lot of material in narrative notes and I have entered basic details into a family tree software package. But, I also experimented with very detailed hand-drawn family trees. However, these are hard to reproduce or copy.
My Current Thinking
Currently, my thinking is to have a number of fairly simple family trees generated “manually” in Word. These provide more detail of the various branches of the family shown in this summary family tree.
Six Branches
So far, I have gathered enough information to document six family branches – Drew, Redfern/Redfin, Parkin, Lander, Cirket and Bowler. For two of the branches, Nolan and Hurst, I don’t have enough information to draw a family tree. So, for these, I have recorded the information I have as a narrative.