Branching Out

Booth London Map

Early London Maps – Samuel Crowder 1794-1867

In the Charles Booth Archive, there is a map of London drawn in 1898 which highlights the extent of poverty in London. Charles Booth accompanied police officers on a tour of each district, street by street where they described the inhabitants, levels of poverty & crime and colour coded a map of streets from upper class & wealthy, down to lowest class to vicious, semi criminal. As my Crowder relations lived in London around this time, this seems to be a good topic to explore in the “MAPS” theme from #52ancestors this week. Could the reason they decided to relocate to the colonies be linked to changes in the social character of their neighbourhood?

Surname Connections

Branching Out Big Time

When I first started researching my family tree, it was just on my maternal Watson side, as I already had a copy of a tree inherited from my father of the paternal Kent side. This soon evolved to researching the lines of my 2 grandmothers families (Crowder & Hobson) and the lines of my half-siblings (Wall). This proved invaluable when I received the results of my first DNA test, as I was able to trace the relationships of some of my matches and also confirm the research from historical records. There were however many, many DNA matches, who completely unknown to me, which was the prompt to branch out even further.