This family took the curiosity of my cousin Christopher Briscoe when he was doing his 'Brides and Daughters' research and he invited me to join him in a trip to Dublin for three days to see if we could find a little more about John Wetherall. Fortunately we did, so the trip was not wasted. What we found was a highly abbreviated abstract of his will. But the original had perished in the flames of the Custom House in 1922 so we could not be certain what it contained.

As in all these things, a bit of luck recently came my way. I was told that a descendant of John Wetherall had written a book in 1911 about many other descendants and more remarkably there was a copy in the Society of Genealogists in London and it contained the full text of the will.

And from the book are photographs, not photocopies, of:

• The Candelabra presented to George Augustus Wetherall - 644 Kbytes
• The large family tree included at the end of the book - 717 KBytes

The author of the book obviously went to enormous trouble to find the origins of his earliest known ancestor, John Wetheral, who was an official in the Dublin Customs, but failed to find any clear evidence of even his father, though he was fairly sure who he was. I can believe that he went to similar trouble with all his relations but he included not very much detail and no references. I have included in my main database a few bits of information from public indices to English births, marriages and deaths and hope to add a few more later this year when I invest some serious money in something like FindMyPast.

In copying the book, I omitted the seven pages about the duke of Kent as he was no relation to the family.