Weber/Bullock Tree

All my mother’s side of the family grew up believing we were to some extent of Jewish descent. Given that her mother’s maiden name was Amos, and there is a book of Amos in the Old Testament, this was completely believable. But when I discovered in the census that my grandmother’s parents lived in Essex and worked in the silk weaving industry, I started on another train of thought.

 Perhaps this branch of the family was of French Huguenot descent? I found out that some people think Amos is a corruption of the French Amis, and this would fit in well with the new theory. There is still a lot of research to do on this.

A couple of months before my mother died, in March 2000, I asked her where her family had originated from. It was the first time it had occurred to me that they might not have been native Londoners. They came from Bristol, and my great-grandfather had worked in the docks in both towns.

 I am the youngest child of two youngest children, so my cousins are all quite a bit older than me. Some of them knew about the Bristol connection. We were able to piece together quite a bit of information using the family bible, which my great-grandmother had kept up-to-date with the births of herself, her husband and all her children, as well as one or two deaths.

Finding my great-grandfather’s birth in the registers proved a problem. I ordered a certificate for Henry Walter Bullock from the correct quarter, and from Bristol, but it wasn’t him. As his birth was on Christmas Eve, I looked in the first register of the following year, 1856, and found a Walter Henry. This was the right man.

I didn’t know my great-grandmother’s maiden name, but one of her daughters had the middle name Heath. I decided to look for an Elizabeth Heath, and found my target straight away.

Unfortunately, to this day, I have never found a marriage entry for them. I’m beginning to suspect no marriage ever took place.

When I started my famly history research, I didn’t think I’d ever get any further on my father’s German side of the tree than the few documents I’d inherited from him.  Thanks to the internet and an unusual surname from my paternal grandmother, I soon had a paternal family tree dating back as far as 1560. It had been compiled by the husband of a German cousin of whose existence I had previously had no knowledge. He is a retired teacher who reads old German, and they still live in the area the where the family originated - in Schwabisch Hall, Wurttemberg. One morning the family tree and an accompanying 28-page booklet just dropped on to my doormat! It took me six months just to load everything on to Family Tree Maker.

This is a photo of my paternal grandparents, Albert and Kuni Weber (nee Hareuther) with their five children, Fred, Albert, Edward (my father, on his dad’s knee), May and Alfred. They came to England separately, Albert from Grab in Wurttemberg and Kuni from Obersteinbach in Bavaria, and met because Kuni’s uncle Georg Maar and Albert were fellow bakers in south London. They married in 1897.