User:Rmg

This user is a WeRelate administrator (verify)

About Me

Basically I am Welsh, but with all sorts of other stuff thrown in.

My grandfather started my interest in genealogy 40 years ago with a story he told. His family were descended from a travelling tinker who toured the large houses in North Wales every year spending days or weeks repairing household items, he started up a relationship with one of the maids in one house, seeing her a few weeks each year. Eventually they married and she travelled with him on his route. As with most young couples there were inevitably children, at this point she insisted they settle down in one place to raise a family. There is so far no evidence that this is true, or even remotely true.

I grew up in Manchester and the family moved to the south coast of England when I was seven. Grandfather continued to tell his stories, which only confused my later research as he seems to be an inveterate liar.

I have rambled through life with work in catering, farming, electronics and computers and I have lived in many places in England and Wales until I moved to Nederland and now live in East Germany.

My Research

My grandfather started me off on the wrong path, not only with the story of the tinker, his middle name was Victor which he claimed was due to the fact he was born on the day of the Queens Jubilee. He was not. Searching in Wales for people named Davies is hard enough without misinformation, especially when there were no online sources, or even computers. It was 30 years later that I found him through his marriage but have only managed to get back 3 generations from there. I now have almost a full set of common Welsh names having added Williams, Edwards and Jones as well as Anderson which may link to Denmark.

The other side of my ancestry was a lot easier, I have Grists going back to 1500 and several cousins I have found who are all researching the line of peasants with few records. There was another flurry of rumours in this line, stories about being connected to Scottish Royal households and a trust fund from a millionaire ancestor. I have got close to finding the Scottish Royal link, two lines in the same county at least. The trust fund was a lot smaller than the stories and is now gone but the documents do link several lines in the US, England, Italy and South Africa. Much research has been done by others but most is unsourced copies of other trees and there are numerous errors.

My partner in Nederland was also interested in genealogy, and a name like Geleick should be easier to research than Davies, but it is so rare there are virtually no records. With less than 20 living today and about 130 online records, most put online by me, research is slow. It is made worse by the fact the family were in Ostpreußen for a few centuries and wars back and forth have destroyed many records, lots more are stored in a damp cellar in Moscow and will probably rot there

Currently I am rechecking and adding sources to my direct line tree of 2600 people. So far I have found no duplicates here of any of my line, but some of the conjectural assumptions of links to pre 1600 people are already here though I have researched these in depth and will be adding more information and multiple sources.

My Paternal Line

My Maternal Line