22 Apr 2019

Latest research and discoveries


It is 14 months since I last wrote about the Swinfields and the research which I have been conducting on the family's history. Early in 2018, I wrote about the exciting discovery of the "Family Bible", now in America, which Thomas Swinfield had taken with him on his trip across The Atlantic in 1854. That book had in it a record of his ancestry, which is what I now call Families 5 and 2, stretching back through five previous generations to Richard Swinfield born in 1645 at Markfield in Leicestershire. It has survived a journey of thousands of miles by sea and land via New Orleans and Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to its current home in Montana.

Since then I have not been idle although I have not yet written about new discoveries. Over the past months, I have been actively pursuing the research in online indexes and sources as well as through original records. That has included three days in Leicestershire Record Office in September 2018 and a day in the Staffordshire Record Office in March 2019. I have also been utilising the new DNA tools that have recently been made available by the genetic testing companies to locate new branches of the Swinfield trees. That has given me new information which I trust will be of interest to all of you who are interested in our surname and its history. 

One very significant discovery, which happened in February 2019, is that yet another Swinfield Family Bible exists.


This time it documents members of Family 3C who live in New South Wales in Australia. Following the announcement in the newspaper of the death of Dawne Gwendolyn Swinfield in January this year, I wrote to her family expressing my condolences. Her son John passed on my message to his sister Julie Holmes. She informed me that she has inherited the Bible that was given to her great-great-grandfather, George William Swinfield (1854-1936), by his wife Elizabeth (McCarthy) as his 24th birthday present on 24th July 1878. The Family Register pages have been used by that couple and their descendants to document the births, marriages and deaths of another six generations of this branch of the family.  





















What a genealogical goldmine!                 How many more bibles are waiting to be discovered? 
                                                    Do you have one?


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