Family History 2.0

Bigelow Family History

Having set out the Gaze Family History so far, we now come to my mother's family, the Bigelows.

The early part of the family story contains a certain amount of unsubstantiated material. The key point in this tale is the life of King Edward I of England.

Before his time we could have traced a variety of family lines from the royal histories of Europe. But we have chosen to collect information about just two: Edward's mother, and Edward's father.

Someone has reckoned that there are around 17,000,000 people in the world descended from King Richard III, whose body was recently rediscovered in Leicester. So no doubt the number of families connected to Edward I is even greater, because he lived even earlier. You have only to work out how many ancestors you could have had in the year 1000 to see why this is likely to be true.

 

Over the net few weeks I will explore this history, sometimes, the period before Edward, and sometimes the period after him, especially the story of the ancestors who sailed from England to the new colony of Massachussetts around 1640.

Fortunately there is a lot of material on the internet about this period, collected by the enthusiastic Bigelow researchers in North America. We are fortunate to be able to piggyback on their work!

 

The posts that deal with the period before 1630 will be numbered 2.01 to 2.99, and those after 1630 will carry numbers above 2.100

Edward I on his throne