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< Click to enlarge family history chart: seven generations of Allens.
The search for my ancestors really began when I saw an advert in a heraldry magazine, in about 1982. A firm in Canterbury specialised in carrying out family history research, so I wrote to them to enquire.My interest in Coats of Arms took a back seat while I exchanged correspondence with my researcher: I passed to him what little detail I had about my father and in return I received periodical reports of what the researcher found in the London record offices.In a remarkably short time I received copies of my father's (John Alfred Allen) and grandfather's (John Stephen Allen) birth certificates, followed by a transcript of the 1881 census return for No. 3 Crooms Hill, Greenwich, showing my great-grandfather's (William George Allen) whole family in residence. After this, the pace slowed down; we discovered that my great- grandfather (a master Lighterman on the river Thames) had been one of two boys (both of them named William George Allen) who had served their apprenticeships together.My researcher made several trips to London in an endeavour to find which of the two boys became my great-grandfather, but the task became more complicated when he discovered there were at a given time several Allen families living in the same part of Greenwich, some in the same road and even in the same house, who were not apparently related to one another. Most of them had Lighterman or Waterman connections.
This shows that *boy (a), William George Allen, was the son of William Allen, Waterman, who later became a river pilot and was NOT my great-grandfather. The same William Allen was almost certainly the master of both boys when serving their apprenticeships.It therefore follows that my ancestral family is William Allen and Martha Allen (née ?).
Click here to go to the family tree. According to the baptismal records at St. Alfege church they had 3 children:
This William George Allen was my great-grandfather. Further into my investigations I was able to obtain a copy of the 1901 will of my great-grandfather, and to my surprise I discovered, when I compared it to the 1881 census return, that a name was missing from the will. It was that of my grandfather, John Stephen Allen. On the 1881 census he was shown as a Lighterman's apprentice, aged 19, but in 1901 when his father died he was not mentioned in the will. I subsequently discovered that he had died in 1895 at the age of 33.
Mike says: I've since found out that William & Ann's eldest daughter, Mary Ann Jane Allen, also did not feature in her father's will, having pre-deceased her father by some sixteen years. My dad was not aware of her, and I wasn't until very recently - my thanks to Ron Brasington, whose wife is the great-grand daughter of Mary Ann Jane Allen.
I will thus start the story with William George Allen because he has been the key figure in my research.
Continues on page two
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Text by Alf Allen 1999. Edited and spell-checked by Mike Allen 2003.
Most photos taken by Alf and most illustrations drawn by him; scanned from
his albums, etc., now in my possession and digitally edited 2003-2005.
Yes, yes, the photos and layout need updating - the website was first designed in "dial-up days", before any sort of broadband, and everything had to be small so it uploaded and downloaded fast. Work to do, I know.
Website produced 2003-2013 by Mike Allen - a fatuous platitudes production.
Attempting accessibility:
Last changed 28-Aug-2013 22:54