Pedigree ummmm

Earlier this century I came across a copy of the "Fovargue Family Indented Pedigree" on an auction website, so am now a proud owner. My great-great grandmother Elizabeth Kisby was born a Fovargue and, when I first visited the Cambridgeshire Kisby heartlands in 1995 I bumped into a distant Fovargue relative, completely by chance. The Fovargue Family Indented Pedigree was also published in 1995, well before the days of Ancestry or Findmypast. It runs to over 150 pages listing, describoing and indexing all Fovargues from 1513 to the (then) present day. It's a mammoth work, put together in the days when you were lucky to have a word processor, let alone a computer ...or the internet.

Kisby W1A_1940

 

The Fovargue Pedigree has tempted me to try and compile something similar for the Kisbys, Kisbees and Kisbies and Kisbeys. Things will be much easier with the proliferation of online and electronic resources these days. My Kisby research comprises an ever growing mixture of genealogy programmes, spreadsheets, electronic files and some hard copy material. I've always fancied the idea of creating a book and I think it's high time I pulled everything together into a digestible format ...though I struggle with the word 'pedigree', which conjures the idea of proving good breeding with the aim of creating a pure Kisby master race!!

My inner civil servant has prevailed and I've spent the dark winter evenings drawing up Kisby families into 'indented pedigrees'. The good news is that it's helped me fill some gaps, connect some strays and generally pull things together in one place. The bad news is that the dark evenings are getting shorter, the list of chores and competing tasks is beginning to grow, and it may be 2095 before I finish. But if anyone else likes the idea and wants to offer encouragement, well, please tell me. We may find out eventually we're well enough bred to enter Crufts!

Kisbey

Judge William Henry Kisbey (1828-1910)

At last I've managed to finish (and upload to my Kisby website) the annotated pedigree sheets (IR1A) for
Richard KISBEY of Dublin, who gave us the surname variant KISBEY. There are KISBEYs today in the UK and also on the West Coast of the United States.

The KISBEYs are particularly notable, in contrast to the generally humble KISBYs. Richard's namesake son Richard was a parliamentary correspondent for The Times newspaper in London. Another son William became a wealthy County Court Judge in Belfast and Dublin. Several of Judge William's children emigrated to Canada. There is even a town in Saskatchewan named Kisbey after William's son Richard Claudius KISBEY, who had settled in the region, married the local MP's daughter and ran the local mail driving contract. Richard invested in land, some of which he sold in 1904 to become the site of a new settlement that took his name.

One day I need to work out where the Dublin KISBEYs originated. Ireland was part of Great Britain at the time, so I suspect Richard Snr's father may have arrived in Dublin from the mainland, though this is entirely conjecture at the moment based on his status and religion (Church of England). Watch this space!

http://kisby.one-name.net/kisby-family-lines.htm

15 Days - 15 Collections

In an imaginative mood, Ancestry.com have been giving free access to 15 different sets of records, for for the first 15 days of October only. "15 days - 15 FREE collections" has ended now, but I tried to use the opportunity to go Kisby-hunting.

Unfortunately Ancestry's records have a repuation for being badly transcribed. I've tried on several occasions to search the US Census records for Kisby's but rarely with success. For example, the 1920 Census (part of the "15 days" release) should contain dozens of Kisby's but according to the index search there are none! In their defence, the US was populated by immigrants from all nationalities, many of them with unusual unexpected surnames to confuse the transcribers.

So I chose to extract as many KISBY, KISBEE and KISBEY births from the 1916-2005 England & Wales Birth index. I managed to complete the task for the 30 years from 1963 to 1993 (which included the birth entries for my sister and me). Noticeably, during this period, there are almost NO Kisby's born in the old stomping grounds of the English Fens!

Kisby-ee-ey

Greetings to anyone who stumbles across this blog. It is a continuation of my Vox.com blog, The Kisblogger.

There were approximately 350 Kisby's, Kisbee's and Kisbey's listed in the England & Wales 1881 census. Nowadays there are probably over 1,000 worldwide. Most of us will have ancestors that originated in the East of England, around the English Fenlands, but there are also Kisbey's from Ireland and Kisby's from Denmark. I'm interested in tracing the origins of the English Kisby's in particular so if anyone wants to help then I'd love to hear from you.