It wasn’t until my children started asking questions about our family and where we came from that I realised how little I knew about our family history. I said it might take a couple of weeks to sort it out. It has now been nearly twenty years and there are still more questions than answers remaining. One thing that has changed over this time is that there is much more information on line but most of it cannot be relied upon except for pointing you in a direction. For confirmation, it is always advisable to go back to the original sources. This means visits to libraries and record offices and browsing through old books, written sometimes in english, sometimes in Old English and other times, more rarely, in Latin.
My grandfather had died in 1934, before I was born and my father was now no longer with us so I knew very little about the Kefford side of the family. There was no one to ask so I started looking through the microfiche records of Kefford births, marriages and deaths ( BMDs ) from the start of civil registration in 1838 to the present day. Being a methodical sort of bloke, I wrote down all the Keffords I found. There were quite a lot so I put them all into a spreadsheet. I then found I could ‘reconstruct’ families by sorting the spreadsheet for different data such as birth dates, names or places. Once I had found one of ‘my’ Keffords, I sent off for their birth certificate. This gave me information on the previous generation.
I also used the censuses to find out where they were living and their occupations. By these means I slowly traced the Keffords of my family back through Brighton, Brentford to Bassingbourn in Cambridgeshire where they were wheelwrights and blacksmiths.
I had also accumulated many other Keffords who were not related to me, as far as I knew so I started putting their families together and this took me further afield, to Australia in six cases. I found contacts in England, Australia, America and Hawaii so there was a lot of letter writing and later, e mail.
I had stopped research on my own family when I reached two William Keffords who were born in the same village in the same quarter of the same year as I was unable to differentiate between them and so could not establish which was ‘mine.’
By this time, I had set a ‘Kefford One Name Study’ and registered it with The Guild of One Name Studies ( GoONS !).
I followed many trails and came across a document in the Cambridge record office that mentioned Keffords and was dated 5th. Eliz. It was on parchment, with a seal and in latin. I had to find out what it said! I found out that Queen Elizabeth was crowned on 7 September 1558 so ‘5th. Eliz. referred to the fifth year of her reign so was 1563.
I managed to find a latin scholar who would translate this document for me. It was a land sale document. John Kefforde, yeoman, bought ‘One close of pasture called The Stewe Pyghtell, including one pond in the Parish of Barley from James Porter, labourer.’ in Hertfordshire for forty six shillings and eight pence and three bushels of wheat. There is a lot more, of course, in the document and I had to look up some latin that had been translated into Old English to make sense of it all.
I then found John Norden’s survey of England which had been reprinted and the map of Barley showed the land mentioned on it with the name Kefford clearly shown.
Further research showed that there were several Keffords in Barley around that time and some were wheelwrights so they may have been related to ‘my’ Keffords.
As a footnote to this story, the land can still be traced in the village and there is a house built on this land which is called ‘Keffords.’
Now, when I look at my family tree, I agree with Isaac Newton. I feel I am standing on the shoulders of giants. If anyone of my ancestors had not been there, I would not exist so I feel gratitude towards them, not only for their genes but just for their existence.
The same also applies to the future of course, each generation means a doubling of the number of ancestors required to support the ever growing pyramid.
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