By Tony Storey
The new year has begun on an optimistic note with a number of former Sole Society members deciding to re-join. As a result, I am daring to hope that family history is coming back into fashion. To all those who have returned I extend a warm “welcome back”. New sources of information are released every month so in the time you have been away there may well have been a vital snippet that enables us to overcome that ‘brick wall’ that once stood in the way of your research.
New members this year include Chas Charles-Dunne whose family tree seems to be centred on India. I doubt we can help him there, but his extended family has connections in Scotland and East Anglia, where we hope to make some progress. Tim Sewell is also new to the Society and as with all new members, we need to start by establishing where his family is from.
We still get the odd question that we cannot answer. For example, Beatrix Jorgenson wonders if the Sewell name might have originated from an Italian town named Sassulo, in the province of Modena. In the November 1998 issue of Soul Search we published an article by the late Eric Sewell which you can read for yourselves on our website. It is not impossible for a traveller to be misheard and spelling was very fluid in medieval times. I suspect we will never know for sure.