This website is a research-oriented collection of items pertaining to the Fernee and Godart families of London, England. The events gathered here will not provide a complete picture of any one person, just tidbits from their lives. Here we have the scanty beginnings of a full understanding of each family, which requires context - what skills did their jobs entail, what was their neighbourhood like, what were the mores of the time, and so on. The web is a perfect location for such a study - accessible to far-flung cousins and easy to refine as assumptions are proved or disproved and new information is discovered. The Fernee & Godart family history website is by no means finished!

Navigate via the surname index or the charts, both accessible from the top menu. Each person has his or her own page. Information is presented as a chronology of life events followed by a family section listing children. For quick reference there is a pop-up pedigree which displays the subject's parents and grandparents. A link is provided to any charts on which the person appears and any relationship to the ancestral couples is noted. At the bottom of the page source citations are listed.

Icon Legend

    my direct ancestor
   the parents of this person are not yet identified
   someone who immigrated or was transported to Australia
   someone who immigrated to Canada
   someone who immigrated to New Zealand
   someone who immigrated to the United States
   click on the camera icon to see a photo
   click on the icon to see information about a place

A note about spelling. Spelling variations occurred at the whim of the recorder and are inconsequential. Generally I have found that if a document uses the spelling Godart or Fernee, it does refer to someone on these trees. However, individual Godarts may be found as, for example, Goddart and the more common Goddard. Fernee may be, for example, Fernie, Ferney, or Furney. Sometimes an accent is added. Indexes often introduce strange spellings, usually due to difficulty interpreting handwriting. Notes for a given document will indicate if the name was recorded differently than the standard Fernee or Godart.

In this database, women are often referred to by their birth surname throughout their life, according to genealogical convention.

English civil registration (birth, marriage, death) indexes are organized by year and quarter. Thus, "Sep Q 1872, Pancras RD" is an event registered in July-Aug-Sept 1872 in the registration district of Pancras. The GENUKI site describes civil registration records.

Census records - images of the pages have been viewed. Spellings, ages, birthplaces and other data in a census is frequently "incorrect". My notes retain the information as it was written by the enumerator, in most cases dispensing with the usual [sic] notation.
Learn more about census records at GENUKI.

There are no details about living people although their names may appear as a child in their parents' family section or on a chart. 

Acknowledgements

  • The many people who are writing to me after finding this website. They are contributing information, photos, news clippings, &c.  All the cousins thank you.
  • Ann Collett, a delightful correspondent who gave me my first peek into this corner of my family tree.
  • On the Fernee side: Michael Fernee, an avid collector of Fernee family history. John Greenwood, my first Fernee contact. Muriel Moffat, a Gostick descendant.
  • On the Godart side: Bear descendants Ann Best, Mary Dyer, Pat Kemp and Cliff Ward.
  • Collectively, the professionals and volunteers who make records accessible at family history centers and on the internet.
  • The developers and supportive user community of The Master Genealogist and Second Site, programs which were used to produce this site.