Linda and Andrew Jones of Ontario Canada
and
David Talmage of London England.

Linda is descended from Elizabeth Ann Willingale born 29th December 1852 in Southminster Essex England and the information provided by her husband Andrew enabled us to complete another direct line to the present and also provided them with the link to the rest of the Willingales.

David on the other hand is unfortunately only a half cousin as he is not directly descended from the Willingales. His Great Grandmother was Sarah Parish and David is descended from her first marriage to Thomas Ellison on 29th of March 1846 in Stepney, London. After Thomas’s death Sarah married William Willingale on the 2nd of September 1855 in Wanstead Essex. William was born in 1832 in Loughton Essex and was a son of John and Susannah Willingale. With the valuable information David has provided as a result of his own family history research we are able to extend our master tree beyond William and Sarah’s three children but, as yet, we do not have any direct lines to the present.

Our thanks to our two new contributors for contacting us with their information and let us hope that more relations come forward in the future with similar results. Also thanks go to Karen Blackwell for submitting the photographs of her Grandparents George and Adelaide Clark. Adelaide was the daughter of Elizabeth Mary Webb nee Willingale and the younger sister of my own Grandmother Lavinia.

We are currently processing information provided by two other cousins and hopefully this research will be posted on to the website on the next update.

Your main researchers, Christine Day, Kim Willingale, Steven Willingale, Linda Pattinson and myself are still busy beavering away at the Essex records Centre in Chelmsford and digging out more useful information regarding the family which we hope to publish in the future on the website for all to read.

Currently I am trawling through the Microfilms of the 1901, 1891 and 1871 Census Returns for Essex looking for Willingales and known desendents. This has produced a lot of useful information which once I have entered it into the computer it will be published on the website. Fortunately the 1851 and 1861 Essex Census returns have been surname indexed making the research a lot easier.

I started researching my late mother’s family around three years ago. As I mentioned above, her mother Lavinia, was the daughter of Elizabeth Mary Webb nee Willingale. It soon became apparent to me that the Willingales were quite unique in that they appeared to be a very close knit family. I soon established that the family basically originated from the Maldon area of Essex and that all the lines that I had traced at that time led back to just three sons of one family born in the late 1690’s and early 1700’s. The ancestral line then goes back to the mid 1500’s and a Thomas Willingale of Great Dunmow in Essex, though this does include a couple of assumptions, one around the 1640’s and the other around the late 1580’s.

It was at the beginning of this year (2002), when I had by now amassed around 250 related names on my Willingale tree, that I came across Steven’s own website. I contacted him and when we found we lived only ten miles apart we decided, along with his mother Linda, to meet up and exchange information. This then led to the idea that we, along with Keith Willingale, one of Steven’s contacts, to set up an exclusive Willingale website to further our research and make contact with our many cousins around the world. Combining our joint research had by then increased the number of related names on the tree to almost 400. One of Steven’s other contacts was Kim Willingale who had amassed as much information as myself. This was quite pleasing to me as it confirmed my own research and visa versa.

What you are reading now is the result of that meeting back in February and as mentioned earlier the tree is now currently up to 539 related names and still all descended from those three brothers back in Maldon.

In the future I will write about some of the interesting facts I have gathered about our ancestors. So until the next time goodbye and keep sending in your information.

Graham Richards, May 2002