The DAWES/DAWS of Ardingly

(FAMILY CHART UPDATED 30 OCT 2009)
I am going to deviate from my normal DAWES Family blog to add some information about another extensive DAWES/DAWS family I have discovered in Ardingly. Ardingly, sometimes spelled Ardingley, is about 9.5 miles northwest of Uckfield which is the seat of my DAWES family.
I was contacted by another DAWES who found an old query of mine from 2005 on the Rootsweb DAWES Mailing List. This just goes to reinforce why you should use every means possible to contact your potential relatives. In helping this person identify his DAWES connections, I had a look at the DAWES' in Ardingly and was surprised at how large the family was.


At left is a quick chart (click on the chart to open in a larger window) that I have thrown together to show the family from 1761 up to the early twentieth century and I'm not finished yet. Over the years I have gathered many DAWES family facts into various spreadsheets to make my research easier and I was able to fill in a lot of details from these. However, I also used the IGI data from Familysearch.org (Ardingly Batch C070051 & M070051) plus the census from Ancestry.co.uk. Fortunately, Ardingly has an established church that has been added to the IGI whereas Uckfield does not.

This process also caused me to re-visit my own DAWES research to see where this new person fit in. The only Thomas DAWS that matched my data was one born in Linton, Kent in 1769 but I had no proof. In 1809, a Poor Law Removal Order issued in Hadlow, Kent instructed the family to return to Uckfield so they must have come from there originally. In reviewing my 1841 census copies, I noted that my 3rd great-grandfather had a "Y" in the Born in County column meaning that he was probably born in Uckfield and not Linton. To make it even more dramatic, there was a column of "N's" with his "Y" sticking out. I never picked up on this before and have now headed off in a different direction on my own research.

My point is that no matter what you are researching about your family you usually discover something new or correct something you missed. I hope I am able to link up these two DAWES families in the future.