The Brooksby Family The Brooksby Family
Previous | Contents | Next: Brooksby: The Old Family
This book is the result of two and a half years of steady amateur research into the origins of the Brooksby family. It started as the material for a half-hour talk to the Frisby Historical Society. It grew and grew, until at times it completely dominated the writer's spare time. The it linked up with material collected by Ron City, who has independently undertaken the tedious but necessary search of the Registrar-General's indexes since 1837. A check on the United Kingdom telephone directories showed that the family had remained small, and thence gre the idea, first of contacting all living Brooksbys, and later of the weekend at Brooksby Hall in the summer of 1979.
The book is intended first to encapusalte the main lines of the research done, in a readable form, and then to give a starter to a Brooksby Family Association, whereby modern Booksbys can find their own place in the family and link up with others.
It has not been presented in a scholarly form, with all souces quoted in footnotes, as it was felt that this would make the book unreadable as well as very much more unwieldy. All the original compilations, and the large family trees which contain in detail the present state of knowledge about the Booksbys are in the hands of Ron City, who is starting a Brooksby Family Association and will act as a clearing house for information.
Any present Brooksby who wants to go on with the work, and it is hoped that there will be a number of these, the gaps in the present work being clearly indicated in the text, should contact Mr City, at Post Office House, Main Street, Bretforton, Nr. Evesham, Worcestershire, England. Leicestershire has been well covered, the writer living and working within ten miles of Leicester. In Northamptonshire and Nottinghamshire the surface has been skimmed, in Norfolk and Suffolk, Kent, Warwickshire and particularly Scotland, almost nothing has been achieved (at least by the painstaking standards which family historians set themselves).
But, let us be clear, there will be errors throughout. Family history relies on informed guesses and probabilities. Even the Church of the Latter-Day Saints, who have tried so hard and done so much for the gathering of genealogical material in Great Britain, have worked on guesswork much more than they would like to think. Cast-iron proof hardly ever exists. One weighs up the probabilities, makes a reasonable assumption, and may well find it overturned by a later discovery. The danger for all historical research is that where facts are few, and where long and intense work brings small rewards, the scrap of information finally discovered seems to carry an imporance relative not to itself, but to the eagerness with which it has been awaited. To the hungry miner every scrap of fool's gold looks like an authentic nugget.
The researcher's fallability is compounded by the fallability of all resources. A friend whose wife died five years ago has just discovered by chance that her burial was not entered in the parish register! Multiply that sort of mistake by thousands, and add a generous further element of doubt for half-educated clerks, uneducated and forgetful families, the effects of illiteracy, carelessness and occasional intention to deceive. Think of the days when the value of written evidence was somewhat lightly regarded, add in the devastating effects of periods of civil war, plague, or the enormous industrial growth of populations. Then consider the hundreds of parish register volumes burnt by the bonfire-happy parsons, or kept in such mildewed parish chests that they are unreadable; the parchments which have decayed, the mice which have made their nests out of shredded paper. And after all that, when we have assembled the remaining pieces of the jigsaw, let us never make the mistake of thinking that the important bits have been preserved by some benign providence. The one fact that you have rescued about X may well be the one in which there is a sizeable error.
Wherever possible in this book, the gaps and the guesses are indicated, so that the next researcher can do better. But for as far as I have gone, I must record gratitude to many people, first and foremost Kate Thompson and the staff of the Leicester Record Office, whose standards of interest and helpfulness, and whose ability to keep smiling even on Saturday mornings in the fool flood tide of amateur research, are unsurpassed by any other record office I have ever visited.
Emmeline Garnett
Previous | Contents | Next: Brooksby: The Old Family
$Id: //depot/project/brooksby-site/master/family/intro.html#6 $
Last updated $Date: 2005/02/10 $ by $Author: rb $.