underway again

I have been neglecting my blog, so to reinvigorate it and me, here I go again. I think our names are our memories, fundamental to who we are, is that stating the obvious? So my mother and father married, a Kelly to a Colclough, tradition has it that the eight of us, the product of that union are, were Colclough's, the two girls are now a Webb and a Kinder their children are diversifying there is aready an Ellison, a name appearing in my nineteenth century Colclough documents. Tradition gives me my name, but names as I noted are what we are, our identity, it doesn't seem a great leap to move from say: John son of John, to John son of John from Stafford, to John son of John with red hair from Stafford, to want to create a short hand and a surname in English. The ancient languages are better adapted to lineage, witness 'Mac' 'O' 'Ap' etc. Part of my fascination is where Colclough which you might see as 'col-cluff' is really 'coke-lee'.
     How to find out?
The requirements of the industrial age, increasing populations, taxation, wars and the general need for order means that births, deaths and marriages have been recorded for almost everyone for 150 years. So as the digital age matures and the Irish diaspora searches, more records are becoming available, I can find good information on my Logue, Kelly and Arrigan ancestors and relations but looking much earlier than 1800 is difficult, things like the hearth tax and flax growers lists help but can be arcane.
Looking at my Colclough ancestors is a little easier now I know where to look. It's easier because documents exist. Documents are available from Tudor times because Colclough's had land, land meant manpower, meant money, meant influence, meant power. Preserving all this needed provenance from the dead, but also needed continuity and heirs from the living.
The interest in this blog shows the exponential nature of families, over 4000 page views, views from over 20 countries and from every continent, all Colclough's? It's a source of amazement to me...
Get in touch if you can, if you want to...

More to follow, more history too.
John