Hawker family history - 28th November 2017

I have long been interested in my family history. Around the age of 9 or 10 I realised I had many second and third cousins in the USA, all descended from common ancestors, whose former houses and graves we could see on holiday in west Wales. I found out a lot about it. That is, I found out what my family already knew or had records of. I had barely looked at this since we went to visit some of those cousins when I was 17. One day, I thought, I would get into the whole business of record offices and birth certificates, and fill in the gaps.

Then, just at the tail end of 2016, following a tip from one of those cousins, I registered for a fortnight's free trial of Ancestry. I spent a lot of time on the site during that fortnight, and found I think as much as I could have found in years of basic-level record office searches.

I combined what I already knew with other people's tips, and matched dates, names and other records. The result was a massively extended family tree. I'm fairly confident is accurate in its important parts, and have records to support those. And a son who became as interested as I was at his age at the (now much greater) extent of our known family history. By the time he was asked to research his family tree for homework a few weeks ago, he had made several very long versions of it, and had to be persuaded to truncate it into something manageable for homework purposes. The history of maternal lines seem to be passed on to daughters, and that's what we knew more of already. The male lines, retaining surnames, were easier to trace back on Ancestry.

We traced the Hawkers back further than we thought we could, to what is now south east London. We never knew my great grandfather Hawker was a twin, nor of the third cousin that I heard from through Ancestry, though I heard no more from him after speculating about the reasons the families broke contact (Exclusive Brethren). Others of Dad's family came from Suffolk, Hampshire, and Herefordshire.

On Mum's side, we knew most about the Watkins - her mother's father Evan emigrated from Wales to the USA, building many houses in Denver, Colorado, before returning to his home village. He left behind two sons and ultimately many distant cousins. His grandfather lost his farm whilst in debtors' prison during the Welsh tithe wars. Family legend says it was taken from him unjustly. Papers I've found make it look like he mortgaged it to his cousin and probably forfeited it to pay the debt to his cousin. Family legend says a lot of things. Evan's brother allegedly traced the Watkins back to France and the "White House" in Ireland (surely not this one), but for me the trail runs cold.

My mother's father's family, Phillips, have their own legends, not least relating to R, a farm which was run by the Phillips from the 1830s until 2008, though as tenant farmers for the first half of that time. It turns out that they can traced back much further in time, and forwards, than the Watkins, because they can be linked to a line that others researched in pre-internet times. My son is the only remaining descendant of my great-grandfather Joseph Phillips, but Joseph's brothers' and cousins' lines seem to have been more fecund. We might be descended from Sir Thomas Phillips, squire of Henry VII, and Cadifor the Great of Dyfed in the 11th century. Or we might not. It all depends on who was the mother of one of our 18th century ancestors, a question we couldn't shed light on after a fruitless trawl through Pembrokeshire records and churchyards. Then again, if we could trace all family tree branches that far back, we'd be related to millions of people, royalty or not.

Debbie's family has its own stories, with an unknown great-grandfather, though the great-grandmother's family can be traced back through generations of New Forest villagers to the 17th century, and others to elsewhere in the West Country. One branch is thought by her uncle to descend from the Earls of Devon, though a trails to the evidence run dry, and seem to me to point more plausibly to a family in Southampton. It turns out the hardest branch to trace is Scottish one. She has distant cousins in Canada but we can't figure out exactly how they're connected.

Before the Ancestry trial expired, I saved the most important records, of direct ancestors, offline. I have an offline program for the tree too. I can still add to the tree online, but not see new records. With so many new people and branches uncovered, I now have many more unanswered questions, but I thought I'd done enough for the time being. If I get serious about extending the family tree further, I can go back to it. In the meantime it's immensely helpful for matching to the family records, papers, and photos, formerly belonging to at least 12 people on that family tree, that I am continuing to sort through.

When the spring came, we made some family history trips. I optimistically thought we could pitch up at graveyards and search for evidence of missing links. After all, I'd been shown Watkins family graves as a child and knew where to look. I had press cuttings indicating where Joseph Phillips and his siblings were buried, and could make a reasonable guess about the churches where their forebears might be. Surely it was worth a look?

I got a hint of how hard it could be with a short exploratory trip to find some of Debbie's family graves in Hampshire. The cemetery in Southampton, where I hoped to find an alternative ancestor to the Earls of Devon, was so huge we hardly knew where to start. In the known family churchyard of Copythorne, with difficulty, we found two of the three known family gravestones.

We were hardly more successful in Wales. At Capel Wig, Llangrannog, we found several family gravestones, one of them heavily overgrown, but not Evan's, which I saw there 25 years before. Capel Wig is a nonconformist chapel. I believe burials from the mid 18th to mid 19th century had to be in parish churches. I looked in Llangrannog parish churchyard and found some names which could be related, but nothing obvious. The same with Penbryn Parish Church and, even more so, Penmorfa Chapel. Stone inscriptions seemed to last longer in the unpolluted Welsh countryside than in Southampton. Nevertheless there seemed little hope of finding 18th century evidence on gravestones.

It didn't stop me dragging my sister and my son on a trip to look for them. At Narberth parish church I could not find Benjamin Phillips, said to be there by a description I'd found online. My great-great-grandfather James, who was also Joseph's brother, was last known in Narberth in the 1901 census, and not in 1911. He's the only one of seven siblings, brought up at R, whose place and date of death we don't know. I have found no record of it in the papers I've searched through, and very little about him at all. I bought two death certificates and neither looked like his. Narberth is a small town, which in the early 20th century had several nonconformist chapels. I imagine that James, like most of his family, would have been buried in one of them. But most of that chapels are closed. He couldn't be found in the Bethesda Chapel graveyard, or among the URC gravestones, which had been removed from the grounds of the now privately owned church building, arranged around a car park below.

St Clears churchyard showed no sign of the Phillips who had married into the rector's family in the late 1600s, and who were the key to whether we can be linked to the 11th century line. Henllan Amgoed Chapel, mentioned in genealogies compiled by one Frank Phillips, gave no sign of Phillips with first names matching any in our family tree. Ford Chapel in Wolf's Castle, where I guessed my great-grandmother Jane Williams might have worshipped, is now a private house with no sign of relevant graves. We saw again the graves we'd seen in St Dogwells of the R dynasty, and skipped those we've also seen in Berea.

At last, at Zion's Hill where we knew they were buried, we found the grand, and very overgrown graves of Elizabeth, Thomas, and John, but no sign of their brother Francis or my great-grandparents Joseph and Jane, also buried there according to our records. Thomas was a chemist and prominent Haverfordwest citizen who gave a pair of iron gates to the town, but the gates are gone and forgotten (I have the press cuttings, photos, and even his notes from the opening speech), with the Pembrokeshire record office recording them (until corrected by me) as a gift from his nephew. We didn't attempt (and hadn't planned to) Cilsant or Picton Castle, where Phillips families (if we're connected to the 11th century line) lived up to the 17th century. We briefly stopped at Farthing's Hook, where their grandfather was a miller. It looked lovely. If we had a party of 8 visiting on a family history trip we could rent it. By the time we went through Maenclochog, home of the Phillips in the mid 18th century, the rest of the party were too tired and hungry to look further. I took them back to Narberth to eat, only to find I couldn't join them but would have to go back to Zion's Hill, where I'd left my backpack and all my family history records (thankfully they were still there).

I did also contact some of the relevant clergy and it got me no further. It was a good lesson in family history being hard to progress beyond Ancestry, not best pursued by turning up at graveyards, and barely significant to current memory. Like the forgotten histories in One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Visiting old family houses was much easier. The current owners of R, who we'd met a few years ago, were very welcoming. As were the owners of three houses built by my great-grandfather in Aberaeron and Pontgarreg, in the style of Colorado town houses. Two of the owners had been there for decades, one of them remembered my great-grandfather, and another couple had restored original features of the house. We were even sent to meet someone who had been taught by my grandmother in the 1920s. The lady in the farm which was lost in the debtor's prison (which we'd also seen before) wasn't so keen to see us...

Nearly 30 years ago we tried to visit one of the houses Evan built in Denver, Colorado. "Not today, ladies," said the guy on a Sunday morning to my mother and sister. We have photos and addresses of at least seven others, and they can still be found on google earth. I wonder what their inhabitants know of their history?