The author is retired following a career in industry leading an engineering team furnishing rolling element bearings for the aircraft engine and airframe industries. His interest in family history commenced with the search for any surviving cousins of his elderly father, who had become cut off from his Mowbray cousins by the loss in childhood of his own father and his mother's subsequent re-marriage. This prompted a search for the earliest ancestor and then a forward search for all lines of Mowbray descent down to present day times.

It was not long before this blossomed out into a world-wide study registered with the Guild of One-Name Studies. Members of this group are committed to answering all enquiries about the surname under study, usually freely in exchange for input data and a SASE.

I was born in Sheffield, YKS in 1935 but my ancestors down to my grandfather were farmers and graziers in the village of Fishtoft near Boston, LIN. The earliest located is Henry Mowbray who married Eleanor Totnaham in Sibsey in 1712/3. Henry's origins have yet to be uncovered. My marriage to my wife Margaret was in 1962 and we have three daughters plus five grandchildren at the latest count. From 1956-59 I was at King’s College, Newcastle (then part of Durham University but now Newcastle University). Hobbies and sports have included cycle touring and racing, rock climbing then in later years two and one crew sailing dinghy racing.

In 1939 my parents had re-located to Newark, NTT where my life was spent until 1970 when my job took the family to Harrison, New York, USA for two years. This involved travel around most of the mainland States. Return to England at the end of the assignment settled us in Gloucestershire and we now live in a 200-yr. old cottage in a village some 7 miles east of Cheltenham

The other names in my ancestral history are listed in a table on the page Other names being traced. 

Home Page | The mediaeval Mowbrays | | The one-name study | Origins of the Name | Forum | DNA