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In the early 1980s, my grandmother gave me a copy of her mother Mary’s birth certificate, obtained by my great great grandfather, William Gardiner, in 1895 when Mary left school at the age of 13 to start work at the stick factory in Chalford, Gloucestershire. The certificate told me that William’s occupation was waterman on the canal, that Mary’s mother Elizabeth’s maiden name was Hewer and that in 1895 they were living at Duck’s Nest in Chalford. These snippets fascinated me for years but I didn’t ask enough questions then and the certificate lay in a drawer until well after my mother’s death in 1993 and my grandmother’s in 1994. Chalford was just a place I travelled through on a National Express bus on the way to London. In fact, my research didn’t start in earnest until 2009 when the internet made the task so much easier. Little did I know in 2009 where my research would take me …

So, why is this Francis Hewer’s website? Francis was my first big discovery. Little by little, I have unearthed, first, his huge family of descendants and, second, the story of his parents and especially his elusive father, James. So Francis is central to the stories told on the website.

The stories involve the plight of the agricultural labourer in the first part of the nineteenth century; crime, punishment and transportation in the nineteenth century; the stories of the Thames & Severn Canal and the Wilts & Berks Canal, and the people who worked on them; the decline of the canals and the rise of the railways; the villages of Castle Eaton, Chalford and Latton (and others); the towns of Swindon, Lechlade and Stroud; and, not least, the life of convicts in New South Wales and Tasmania.

If you have found this website, you probably have an interest in Francis Hewer and we are most likely cousins. If you can add any information about any person mentioned on this website, or about any of their descendants, or if you are part of the vast family and would just like to get in touch, please contact me. Names of living descendants are not given on the site, but I am compiling a private database of descendants. I would love to hear from you. No family photos are shown on this website, but I am happy to share the few photographs I have with other descendants of Francis Hewer. If you have photographs of individuals which you are prepared to share, please do get in touch (email address below).

Any errors are mine, and there is still much to be researched and verified. If any information is incorrect, please do let me know.

Notes

Locks on the Stroudwater Canal

Last updated: 29 October 2023

Citing this site  in your research/family tree:

All good, responsible genealogists cite the sources of their research. This website was created as a result of my research into Francis Hewer's family. I have come across someone reproducing  screen dumps from this tree without an accurate source citation.

If you wish to reproduce pages from this website, please cite the source as:

Reproduced from Francis Hewer's Family Tree, https://sites.google.com/site/francishewer. Text copyright Stephanie Richards (stephanier273@gmail.com)