Welcome!

The Bonnycastle family history is very much a work in progress. The internet is a perfect location for this study - accessible to far-flung cousins and easy to update with newly discovered material.  You can contribute by contacting me with stories, photos, documents, or anything that applies to these folks. As well, please let me know of errors or typos on these pages.

 

Who's included?

Every known Bonnycastle who was born over 100 years ago. There are also some born since then, if they are deceased. There are no details about living people but their name only may appear as a child in the family section of their parents.

 

Finding a person on the site

Find someone via the surname index, the charts, or the search tab, all accessible from the top menu. In the index, there is a small script name - Charles, Charlotte, Humphrey, or Richard - after each person who is a descendant of these children of John Bonnycastle, the mathematical master at Woolwich.

There is an individual page for each person which is arranged as follows:

  • Name and birth/death dates
  • Parents' names
  • Relationship, if any, to John Bonnycastle of Woolwich (1751-1821)
  • An "Extended Family" button which opens up a diagram of the subject's siblings, children, parents, grandparents, and great grandparents.
  • Links to charts on which they appear
  • Family section, listing known children
  • The main section - a chronology of life events
  • Source citations
  • A link to contact me with information, photos, corrections, or just to let me know you are interested! 

 

Other areas to Explore

From the top menu you can also connect to

  • Surname Index - which lists everyone who has their own information page
  • Charts - which illustrate ancestries and descendancies of key people
  • Maps - places named Bonnycastle
  • Calendars - just for fun...birthdays and marriages of Bonnycastles in history
  • Images - thumbnails linking to larger images on individual's pages
  • Oddments - a place for interesting things on the site that you might otherwise miss
  • What's New? - major additions and changes to the site
  • Last 50 Edits - lists the most recently updated people

 

Spelling and Dates

The name Bonnycastle appears in myriad forms: Bonny/Bonney/Bony/Boni/Bonni Castle/Castel/Castell and so on. All these variations are intriguing but inconsequential and it's not unusual to find the name spelled different ways within one document. I have standardized the spelling for ease of indexing and the notes for a given document indicate if the name was recorded differently than expected.

When a person's precise birthdate is unknown but can be approximated from census or other records, it is given as a circa date, which is plus or minus a year or two. Prior to civil registration, baptism dates often serve as a substitute for birthdates. For early Bonnycastles for whom I have no indication of a birthdate, there is an approximated or "say" date, which may be off by as much as a decade or two, that is assigned to provide a general sense of where they belong in time, particularly useful for the index. Notice also, that gravestone birth dates may not agree with other sources of birth dates. Written in stone doesn't mean perfect!

In England prior to 14 September 1752, the new year began on March 25th. So when reading old documents, an event that occurred on February 2nd 1740 actually took place in 1741 by current reckoning. This is transcribed in the following form: 2 February 1740/41.  For more details, see the wikipedia article.

 

Odds & ends

Anything in [square brackets] is an explanatory note that I have added.

The information displayed on these pages will necessarily change as the research continues and this site is updated. Although great care has been taken, I do not guarantee the accuracy of all information.

By checking the citations, you can see where a particular piece of information was found and evaluate how likely it is to be correct. For instance, a date of birth from a birth certificate is more reliable than one from a census or a published book. I have not cited every source that supports a fact...there might be 3 census records that say a person was born in Kentucky but I typically don't cite them all.

If you are using any of the information presented here for your own genealogical research, please remember to cite accordingly.  Something along the lines of "Bonnycastle Genealogy, online, http://genealogy.kolthammer.org/Bonnycastle-o/, accessed date" would be suitable.

If you would like to be notified about updates to this site, please contact me.

 

Acknowledgements

  • Numerous correspondents over the past twenty years, as noted in the citations and "What's New" section
  • The developers and supportive user community of The Master Genealogist and Second Site, programs which were used to produce this site.