Wallers and Meadows Page

This sounds a very pastoral sort of page, but it is, in fact, my transcription of the hard work done before me on the Waller side of the family, by Mollie, a cousin of my mother's.  She died earlier this year and I don't think I ever met her (certainly not as an adult), but be assured that I am completely in her debt.  She did the legwork at Somerset House (one would now go to the National Archives at Kew), which is the ideal and most reliable way to research English ancestors.  This is not an option for me at this point from a thousand miles away, so I am very, very glad to have a huge chunk of our history done for us.  I'd completely forgotten that I had a copy of this research until Mum reminded me of it last week.   It came up, interestingly, because I had found copies of Mollie's letter and application forms to retrieve information on Lionel Waller's military records in the files I accessed last week on ancestry.uk.

I have spent the afternoon putting together this information on a separate page (a new link appears to the right), and adding a map and some other bits of information I had, and I will continue to add the Meadows information as I gather it as well.

One amazing mother lode of information that I found in my research today was to do with Earls Colne in Essex, where my great (x's 8) grandfather and grandmother were married in 1663, and which is very close to Coggeshall, where this line of the family was living in the 16th and 17th centuries.  There is a Professor Alan MacFarlane, and his team of social anthropologists from the University of Cambridge, who, over a 27 year span, undertook to create a database of the surviving records of Earls Colne parish from the period of 1380-1854.    This makes Earls Colne one of the most thoroughly socially researched and recorded towns in the U.K.

To anyone reading this who may be interested in seeing something absolutely fantastic to the modern family researcher, check the website for the database:  http://linux02.lib.cam.ac.uk/earlscolne/.   Just imagine - one day in the not too distant future, there will be something like this for every little town and village in the land!  Perhaps not so scholarly right away, but similar in scope.

I will go back to that and see if I can find out if my great-x's-8-grandmother, Mary Brewer, is from Earls Colne, and that's why they married there instead of Coggeshall.  There are a lot of Wallers (Walls) in the records as well.

image credits: http://www.antiquemapsandprints.com