Month: February 2023

  • A Canterbury Tale

    My Father, Bill Carver, spoke fondly of his childhood and early life but did not give away much detail. There is a video recording of him in a ‘talking heads’ interview that my sister made in the 1990’s. He spoke, with some prompts, of his upbringing and life in Oxted, Surrey, where he was born.…

  • Going underground

    Three years ago I was contacted by an heir hunter from south Wales who was searching for the descendants of the Wilcox family. A distant relative who was unknown to me had left a small legacy and he had no descendants of his own. This led to a discovery about two brothers and one sister…

  • Lodsworth, gateway to the Carver family

    The history of the Carver family has its roots in the agricultural 19th Century county of West Sussex. The small village of Lodsworth lies between Petworth and Midhurst, just above the South Downs. The views from Google street view suggest that the village was an idyllic place to have lived in, although I suspect that…

  • Looking for William Wilcox

    If there is one thing that we, living in the twenty first century, will leave behind us it is a shed load of photographs, either in print, or digitally on a computer, or in cyberspace. Many of these pictures of us, posing and pouting will remain there until somebody deletes them. And that might not…