Bob's family hedge


When I was still a schoolboy my brother Steve talked to various members of the family, dug up various dusty documents and produced a wonderful handwritten family tree chart on discarded computer fanfold paper . This became known as the family hedge; it wasn't very high, but ran a long way from side to side.


After graduating I began working with computers (big ones, the sort that live in rooms the size of tennis courts with huge cooling systems) and from time to time thought how nice it would be if someone wrote some software which would store all your relationship data and automatically print nice charts like the ones Steve created so painstakingly.


A few years passed and someone invented personal computers which could fit on your desk. And later still clever people wrote those very programs that I had imagined. So I bought one and installed it on my computer, and copied all the data from the hedge. Then I talked to my parents and added in all the relations who hadn't been born when Steve did his work. Then I got some big chunks of new data from my uncle Alan and my cousin Joan so the hedge grew to over 600 people. Later a distant cousin Nick Gread contacted me from New Zealand and gave me a whole new branch, so now there are over 900 people.


Thanks to the marvels of the excellent Geneweb software and the World Wide Web you too can look at the hedge. It contains about 200 surnames, including VICKERS, WATSON, NICHOL, GREAD, KNAGGS, MARES, HODGSON and TIPPETT. They nearly all came from England, and there is a particular concentration of my father's family is in Durham and Northumberland.