Again I have failed to give an account of the changes for June's update. Perhaps it was because I had not done much as my father had died the month before at the grand age of 94. Anyhow there have been some interesting developments since then.

Perhaps the most striking was another trump from Caspar Verney. This time he came up with a delicious nugget about some Scottish ancestors on my father's mother's side, this time the Browns extending into ancient times, as opposed to the Trotters. The particular connection was with the Robertouns of Earwick in the Hamilton barony. Previously I had them, via Burke, as Robertsons of Earwick and thought nothing more of them. But Caspar forwarded a not incompetent article from the Hamilton Advertiser of July 1874 with the title "Earwick and its Early Proprietors". The Robertouns had a long connection with the Hamiltons of Cadzow (from another branch of whom we are also descended on mother's side) and they had married into a Cathcart family and which family was fully in Jas. Balfour Paul's "The Scots Peerage". The result was at least three weeks of furious work uncovering all the connections, adding around 250 ancestors to the pot. Obviously the weakness in this serious addition is the presumed link to the Cathcarts; I have it on my agenda to see what documentary evidence survives.

As this involved so much work with the Scots Peerage, I finally got round to going through it to find all the connections therein. Perhaps I have not found them all as there are but 609 people now referenced to The Scots Peerage. But between SP and the Robertouns my database is now 600 people larger at 18,812. All of these have been separately entered and for the last five years at least, none have been entered without some reference to show where I got my information from.

Another labour of love has been to go through an excellent book that the London Society of Genealogists sold off as surplus, being a spare copy. This was a very thorough study of five medieval Roydon families by E B Royden. Of these five families, three are related and we are descended from all of those. The pleasure of this work was not only that every factual reference was documented to surviving documents, but that it also included transcripts of the principal ones, wills and charters. Anyhow the genealogy of these three families is now on my site, though I must admit that the only descendants I know of in modern times are those via the Twysdens, both on this and the other side of the Atlantic.

These last three months have ended with a massive accumulation of data about the Powyses of this earth, all from Ancestry.com. I have been impressed by the sheer volume of data that Ancestry has now accumulated and now that it is on the internet, it is easy to access. I am not proposing to cover the variants of the Powys name, such as Powis or Powes, mainly as these would grossly increase the size - and the cost - of the data. While the Powys data items number 1846, the Powises are 10,137 and the Poweses a further 745. I have now accumulated some parish records, some birth, marriage and death index records and the enumerators sheets from three British censuses, 1871, 1891 and 1901. In addition I possess sets of the British Vital Records and the 1881 census from the LDS. I am sorely tempted to get hold of (ie pay for) the certificates of births, marriages and deaths of Powyses as the extra data really is vital to putting together any relationships. My final intention is to extract the data and to put it all in some internet accessible manner (a technical problem or two here) to give easy access to all the data on such records of any British Powyses. As they say, watch this space, though it may take rather long as it looks like quite a bit of work.

Finally I've just remembered that I spent a day or two on bookplates. I had just found tucked within a 19th century volume a pair of bookplates that were almost certainly those of the first Philip Powys of Hardwick, he who married the Lybbe heiress. I knew I had books with bookplate of later ancestors and relations so I scanned these in, cleaned off the foxing and dirt and have made a display of the six bookplates that I have found, plus my new bookplate of course.