The Search - angells-au

It was "internet" boredom that began the search for my family genealogy.

My first action was to type in the name of our station Binerah Downs into the Internet Explorer address bar just in fun. I was surprised to find that the station was listed on a number of sites including one from the UK that actually showed a map of how to get there.

This led me to type in my family name and to my surprise page after page came up with links to Angell family websites and more particularly to genealogy sites. I visited a number of the genealogy sites only to find that most of them focused on the American side of the Angells. I then found a link to genealogy.com where I found information regarding the English side of the family.

Based on my grandfather's name William George and my own fathers second name of William, I began to search for links to both the names and found a George Angell who was born in Unley SA in 1853. After further searching I was eventually able to conclude that George was not our Great Great Grandfather and this then took me to searching for a William Angell.

I read a number of topics in the GenForum on the site and discovered that two brothers emigrated to Australia in the mid 1850's. A link here took me to Barb Angells site www.angellpro.com.au where it seemed to me that her line was somehow related to our line. As it turned out, William Angell was Barb Angells Great Great Grandfather so I was able to rule him out as well.

From visiting Barb's family history I was able to find the names of the rest of the family including a John Angell who I now began to research and in doing so found that he was the person I was looking for. I also discovered his son John William who was born just days after arriving in Unley in 1849. I now had the link to our past. Our Great Grandfather, John William was the first born "Australian" member of the Angell family line from which we are descendant.

I found further evidence in the form of a message on the forum that relayed some information given by our mother, Merle, from back in the 1960's when the search for an heir to the Angells millions was taking place. This led me to speaking to our mother who was able to confirm quite a lot of the information that I had pieced together and at the same time fill in some gaps that were missing on the Australian side of the family.

I now had a starting point for writing the History of the Angell family in Australia.

Researching the Australian side has so far proved the most difficult. I have managed to obtain free records which date up only until 1945 from government sources. To get records from this date on requires payment to the department for certificates of births death and marriages.

The records I have listed on the Angell's prior to their arrival in Australia, have been very kindly provided by Beryl Angell in England who had already researched the Angells in Calne and is still, today, researching the family.

Many thanks to Beryl for her help that allowed me to put this site together.

I still need a lot of help in gathering information on the family and in particular I need help from the present day descendants of all branches of the family. If you can help out in anyway what so ever I would appreciate it greatly.

Of course, the search continues and the project of writing the history will never be completed. However, I would like to hear from you with what ever information you can provide on your family if you are in some way related to the Angells in Australia.

For anyone living in Adelaide I would particularly like to hear from you and if possible, obtain photographs of members of the family you may have in your own collections and also photographs of any headstones or grave sites that may be found at West Terrace cemetery relating to the family members as I believe a number of them would have been buried there.

The search further led me to find some information on Calne and the English county, Wiltshire. Wiltshire is where you will find the famous "Stonehenge". To discover some of the history of Calne you can visit these sites;

www.northwiltslink.co.uk

www.calne.org.uk

Continuing the Search

Here in the mortal world the search for the family history continues and it can only continue with input from living family members.

Some may well know the answers to the questions that continually run through my mind and they consist of how, why and when. These questions keep my awake at night and can only be answered by family members who are still alive today.

The answers to these questions are something that I hope that in time will be forth coming.

My own thirst for our family history is such that I am virtually at the point in this search where if I could be sure I could visit and return from the "other side" and knowing that I would meet up with all my ancestors to complete this website of the family history, I would travel there and meet with them in order to get the all the answers and stories they have to offer.

I really need the when? how? and why? questions answered to satisfy my need for the knowledge of our family history.

I would love to hear first hand each descendants own story and be allowed to print it here for all to read as well as finding out for myself, just how close I am to reporting the history of the family as I see it.

In the last 12 months or so, I have had the feeling that I really need to return to my birth place of Tibooburra to get some more answers before the elderly that remember my family, themselves pass on.

The calling for this return is now that strong that I honestly feel that it will happen before the end of this year (2008) and if it does, I honestly hope I dont make a mistake in giving up a good paying job to follow up on the history of my own family.

Lineage

During my ongoing search for the Angell family, particularly in the UK, it has come to my attention that there are a number of different lines of the Angell families.

The first I shall mention is my own lineage which searching has shown appears to come from Roger of Angelli who dropped the "i" from his name to become Angell.

The second is that during my search it also appears that the name Angell is well and truly in existence long before Roger became an Angell so that now give us two separate lines of unrelated families.

The third is due to the will (dated 1774) of John Angell and the beneficiary Benedict Browne who changed his name to Angell in order to claim the proceeds of the will. Benedict Browne Angell began a third line of Angells that are not related to either of the first two lines mentioned.

Then of course there are the one "L" angels who could be related in some way possibly due to spelling errors with either my own forebears name of Angell being an error or Angel being an error.

There are other lines as well and these also take the single "L" option being children who were left on Church steps and when taken in were given the name of Angel as in a gift from God. I would imagine that there would be many of these Angel's who are not related to any other line.

Created on 07/10/2008 08:05 AM by Rod
Updated on 25/04/2010 11:21 PM by Rod