About The Wood Family of Alveley
Please sign in to see more. "And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time." T.S. Eliot, "Little Gidding".
This is a website for family historians with links to the Wood family of Alveley, Shropshire, England. It traces the family line from William Wood, born in about 1739 in Alveley, and his wife Hannah Rogers, in particular the branch descended from their great grandson William Wood, born in 1832 in Alveley, who settled in Oldbury, Worcestershire, probably during the 1840s, and became a cordwainer. I am very grateful to Margaret Sheridan, historian of Alveley, for her assistance in establishing the family line. This is also, and equally, the website of my mother's family, the Browns of Biddulph, Biddulph Moor and Horton in north Staffordshire, and of Congleton in Cheshire. I am in the process of adding further information from the recently released 1911 England census.
In addition, the site contains information on families which are in some way connected with the Woods, for example the Binnian / Binnion / Benyon, Rogers, Fletcher, Kirkham, Rowley, Williams, Scriven, Dovey, Landon and Beddoe families of the Alveley, Highley and Chelmarsh areas of Shropshire; the Wright and Skidmore families of West Bromwich and the Badham family of Herefordshire; the McCormick, Boden, Cooke and Smith families of Oldbury, Worcestershire; the Jeavens, Plant, Nock, Westwood, Fradgley, Tromans and Willetts families of the Halesowen, Brierley Hill, Kingswinford, Dudley and Rowley Regis areas; the Farrier / Ferrier, Leach, Prowse, Burman and Pillar families of Devon; the Inett and Hinett families of Worcestershire and Staffordshire; the Corn(e)s family of Wombourne, Staffordshire and the Arblasters of Brownhills; the Devey, Edwards and Russell families of Pattingham, Staffordshire; the Woodward family of Smethwick and Earl's Croome, Worcestershire; the Priestley family of London; the Brown family of Biddulph Moor and Biddulph, Staffordshire; the Brough family of north Staffordshire; the Hancock family of Mow Cop and later Australia; the Holland family of Gawsworth, Cheshire; the Bickerton and Blackshaw families of Siddington and North Rode, Cheshire; and the Scholey, Chambers, Robinson, Randerson and Wroe families of South Yorkshire. For those born before 1837, precise dates are usually those of baptism and burial. Among the well known people who have a place here are the canal engineer James Brindley, Samuel Plimsoll, inventor of the "Plimsoll Line" on ships, the poet Siegfried Sassoon, and the detective novelist Ian Rankin. There is also the remarkable Ann Inett b. 1754, sentenced to death in Worcester for housebreaking but reprieved and subsequently transported to Australia, where she had two sons by the Governor of New South Wales, Philip Gidley King, and eventually returned to England in 1820. Finally, my fifth cousin Geoff Mellor has discovered that, through the Brown side (De Limesi / Tostini line via the Stafford family), we are both related to William the Conqueror and the Duke of Norfolk, and that Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II is our 27th cousin twice removed! There are, of course, numerous websites associated with the various families listed here, for example on the Plant family: http://www.plant-fhg.org.uk/start.html and on the Scholeys: http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~scholey/scholey.htm
Y-DNA evidence suggests that the Wood line has distant roots both in Britain and in continental Europe. Males belong to haplogroup E1b1b1a2, a "Mediterranean" type found in north-east Africa, southern Italy, Sicily and Greece, but which is most frequent in the Balkans, Greece, Italy and Belarus. It is rare in the Near East outside Turkey, and appears to have originated in western Asia between 11,000 and 17,000 years ago. Haplogroup E1b1b1a2 (or E3b1a as it was known until a recent change in official terminology) appears to have spread from the Pristina area of Kosovo, in what was part of ancient Thrace, during the past 5,000 years. It is a relatively uncommon haplogroup in England (4% to 5% of men) and may have reached Britain with units of the Roman army, perhaps Thracian, Dacian or Dalmatian cavalrymen. (See http://www.jogg.info/32/bird.pdf) There is a 12-marker Y-DNA match with Bob Wood of Minnesota, a living descendant of Samuel Wood born in about 1782 at Withyham, East Sussex. There is also a 24-marker Y-DNA match with the Nelson family of Liverpool (19th century), now of America. Further tests may give more information about these connections. The precise SNP result is: E1b1b1a2: M148- M224- M78+ P65- V12- V13+ V19- V22- V27- V32- V36+ V65- which is known for short as E-V36. My mother Hilda Brown's mitochondrial DNA group is H3, the second most common branch of the H group. Like H1, it is found mainly in Western Europe, is well represented in Austria, Central Europe, Belarus, Greece and Italy, and is about 16,000 years old. Thanks to Y-DNA information kindly supplied by Paul Scholey, it is now known that the Scholey line belongs to R1b1b2, the most common haplogroup in Western Europe, with matches in Britain, Scandinavia, Germany, France, Italy and Spain.
I would like to thank all those relatives and friends who have so generously helped me gather information about these families and who have lent me precious photographs of relatives and ancestors. I would not have got very far at all with the Plant family without the constant help and support of the "Black Country Plant Brigade" - Kathy Compagno, Dorian Gieseler Greenbaum and Shirley Hughes. I owe a special debt of gratitude to my Farrier kin on several continents, especially to Dr David White, Heather Farrier, and Brian and Beverley Tracey; to my Inett relatives, in particular Dr Ted Inett; and to my late cousin Dr Ronald Edwards whose work on our Brown, Inett and Farrier families first encouraged me to "give to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name".
This site is dedicated to the memory of my very dear father and mother, Bernard Wood and Hilda Wood née Brown. Requiescant in pace.
Dennis Wood.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dennis-Wood/e/B001HPN5J0
|