A history of the West family,
sometime of Sibsey and Wrangle in Lincolnshire, England
Author: Fred West
Editor: Matthew West
Preface
In the 1960's and early 1970's my grandfather, Fred West,
spent a considerable amount of time in his retirement researching
the family history. He succeeded in tracing the family back to
1470 in the male line which is quite a feat, both for him and
the ancestors he traced, considering that we are as a family
"ordinary folk". As part of his studies he gained a
PhD in Local History about land use in Wrangle. As a result,
he was often asked to talk on researching family history.
When he died in 1981 he left his papers to John, his son and
my uncle, and on his death these passed to me. The material includes
a 30 page history of the family up to around the end of the 19th
century, a number of recollections and letters he gained from
a number of sources of family members, transcripts of church
and public records he used in his research, his own journal from
1918, his MA and PhD theses, and various minor publications.
Much of this material is typed using an old manual typewriter.
With the benefit of modern technology, I have been able to scan
- initially the basic history and with the aid of Optical Character
Recognition (OCR) software convert it into a text form. I say
this because the OCR process, although generally very accurate,
occassionally misreads text. I may therefore have introduced
some errors, despite proof reading the results. I have corrected
those very few spelling mistakes I have found. I have also not
attempted to preserve the layout of the original work. I have
broken it up into convenient pieces and added headings and links
where I think these are helpful.
I expect this material will be of interest to anyone who can
trace theri ancestry back to any of the people mentioned here.
However, it tells the story of how a family has survived through
changing times, and this may be of wider interest.
Matthew West
February 2003
Next |
