Doodson family trees.


As mentioned elsewhere, I've not yet tied all the Doodson branches together - probably impossible - and I've only researched a few in detail sufficient to put them into digital format. All are in Adobe PDF file format - to read it you will need to have Adobe Reader, Adobe Acrobat or if you're a Mac user the standard Preview application. Most PCs have one or more of these programs on them.

The family trees presented here are as follows - the links in each description take you to the trees or to separate explanatory pages. If you're interested in someone not on the main set of trees check out the separate page of miscellaneous Doodsons from the 1911 census right at the bottom of the list:

The Pilkington tree:
  • Doodsons in Pilkington, (descendents of William and Sarah of Prestwich), Oldham, Leigh and Sussex - 1700 to present UPDATED NOVEMBER 2011
The Kearsley and Australia tree:
  • Doodsons in Kearsley (descendents of James, John and Robert of Kearsley), Radcliffe and Brisbane, Australia - 1800 to present UPDATED NOVEMBER 2011
The James of Kearsley tree:
  • Doodsons in Kearsley descended from James of Kearsley born in 1568. This family tree comes to an end in the very early 1800s as no Doodsons could be traced any later.
The Egerton tree:
  • Doodsons in Kersley descended from John Doodson born 1781; this family has the unusual first name Egerton repeating. Not linked (yet!) to the other Kersley/Kearsley trees. UPDATED NOVEMBER 2011
The Liverpool and Coalbrookdale trees:
  • Doodsons in Toxteth Park, Liverpool and Coalbrookdale, Shropshire (descendents of Robert and Jane of Liverpool)- 1800 to present. This has grown into an almost unmanageably large tree, so I've split it into two separate documents. Hopefully the "signposts" I've added to each show how they link together. Toxted Park UPDATED NOVEMBER 2011, Coalbrookdale UPDATED AUGUST 1011
The Grappenhall and Thelwall tree:
  • Doodsons from Grappenhall and Thelwall in Cheshire, who ended up in Barrow, Ardwick, Lydiate, Denton and Ardwick in the 19th century UPDATED NOVEMBER 2011. Research on these trees was so interesting I've also written a short essay about it.
The Glossop tree:
  • Doodsons in Glossop from early 19th to late 20th centuries UPDATED NOVEMBER 2011
The Handforth tree:
  • Doodsons in Handforth in the 19th century UPDATED NOVEMBER 2011
The Norfolk tree:
  • Doodsons in Norfolk in the 18th century
Doodsons in Devon and Cornwall:
  • Doodsons who were born or married in Devon or Cornwall. The main tree centres around Ernest Doodson (b1882) who married a Cornish woman when he was stationed in Cornwall in the Royal Navy. UPDATED NOVEMBER 2011
The Clifton and Swinton tree:
  • A family of Doodsons who lived in Clifton and Swinton in the late 1800s/early 1900s. UPDATED AUGUST 2011
The Reuben Doodson tree:
  • A family of Doodsons related to Reuben Doodson (b.1877) - nearly all lived in central Manchester UPDATED NOVEMBER 2011

1911 census "unlinked" trees:
  • A set of smaller trees intended to capture every other person recorded as being a Doodson on the 1911 England and Wales census i.e. those not on the trees above! There's a separate explanatory page for these. ADDED AUGUST 2011, UPDATED NOVEMBER 2011

1841 census "unlinked" trees:
  • A tiny set of small trees that were intended to do what I did for the 1911 census, i.e. ensure all Doodsons listed in the 1841 census were in trees on this site. Not quite so easy - there were quite a few "fragment" families who couldn't be linked to other trees - either because the records pre-1841 were absent or not conclusive, or there were no obvious connections. However, there were a few small trees to add. One more substantive family grouping deserved its own page - people related to one Isaiah Doodson - even though after 1861 all of them were recorded as Dootson. ADDED NOVEMBER 2011

Even now I've got quite a long way with these trees there are be loads of Doodsons that don't appear on any of them, and many 20th and 21st Century Doodsons are missing, as I've yet to trace that many back. And there are enough Doodsons in Australia and the USA to keep my investigative juices going for quite a while!

Note about software used to produce these trees
There are plenty of programs for maintaining and printing family trees, including several for Macs, as well as plenty for Windows PCs. I've tried plenty of them and find them all rather a pain to use, and none of them produce pictures of trees in a way I like. I've opted for a purely visual approach, drawing trees in a standard way each time, using a great Mac program called OmniGraffle. It's not terribly cheap but is great for making diagrams of all sorts - similar to Visio, but as that's not available for the Mac I've opted for OmniGraffle. Once I've created the trees I export them to PDF format, on the basis that PDF readers (e.g. Adobe Reader, Preview on Macs) are commonplace and enable you to zoom in to see the detail, even if the tree is huge.

About the type of tree I've opted for - the Descendent Chart
There are umpteen ways to record and display family relationships. I've opted for Descendent Charts rather than Pedigree Charts.

Pedigree charts can be used to show for a single person all the people they are descended from - you might show your parents, their parents and so on. Of course this means you don't see siblings, aunts or uncles, but if you want to prove you're descended from royalty this is a useful approach.

Descendent charts show who descended from an individual. I've opted to show a "root" for each tree which is a Doodson and his wife, and have attempted to trace all the way to the present day. Sometimes I've had to include several roots for a given document as although it seems inevitable that the various roots are related I've not (yet) been able to link them. For me there are two benefits of the Descendent chart:
1. I'm trying to link as many Doodson trees together so having a root for each makes this easier to do and
2. It makes it easier to work out which tree people who contact me are on, and if they're on the same one as me, what relation they are to me.

By the way the Wikipedia entry on cousins is handy for this - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cousin - the table part way down makes it easy to work out whether you're a second cousin, or a something-or-other cousin once, twice or otherwise removed.

I've tried to make the trees as clear as possible, but as they grow bigger this is difficult. If you have suggestions for improving them let me know.

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