Author: colinsp

I have now moved all the details of my Lefever and variants One-Name study on to its own domain. The website is now available at Le-Fever.org

I have added a new page to this site Called Famous Lefevers. To this page I will add child pages about any famous Lefever people that I find during my research. The first of these pages is about Squadron Leader Peter William Lefevre DFC 1918-1944 and his wartime service. I hope that you find these stories of interest.

I have just done another US data update. I have added an additional 1194 records to the US data set. These records again came from the Social Security death index. This will be my last data update for a few days as I must concentrate on some other tasks.

I have today added 510 new records to the US data set. These records have been compiled from the Social Security Index that is available currently from the US government. I have removed duplicates from the list where I have noted them, if I have missed any please let me know. I am working my way through another 1500 or so records from the same source but it is challenging cleaning the data and making it suitable for display on the site.

I have just added an additional 126 marriage records to the database. These records all came from Pallots Marriage Index 1780-1837. I have added them without checking for duplicates so that is something I will have to check for over the coming days.  

I have just done a small data update to the GB data file. I have added 38 more records mainly from records on http://findagrave.com There were a few interesting stories discovered during this update and the first was a very tragic one I found the burial records for 6 children all under 17 months of age, from the same family, buried in the same plot between 1802 and 1818 in Chingford East London. I found William Lefevre in Canterbury in Kent. He and his wife Frances had a total of 17 children in 19 years, it must have been a baby production line. I found the suicide in 1846 of Sir George Lefevre a doctor in London. I would like to find a bit more about his story I found the death of Squadron Leader Peter Lefevre in 1944. I would certainly like to find out more about Peter’s wartime service and life. That is […]

I have just done a major data update to the GB file. I have added another 958 records to the site this involved a lot of de-duplication effort too. There were nearly 1000 duplicate records to find. I know that there are some more in the dataset BUT combining life event records when you don’t have more detailed information is challenging. I would rather keep the duplicates than make a mistake and combine the wrong records. I have also played with an on-line mapping programme and mapped the 880 births from FreeBMD onto a map. The full zoomable map is visible here.

After a few months off I have done a small update to the site today. I have added the only 5 LeFever records from the Irish census’ in 1901 and 1911 to a new page showing the LeFever’s in Ireland. The reason for the lack of updates has been I have been working on developing a web based application for genealogists to perform collaborative research and contribute data to one master database. The application is well underway and has templates for all the common UK record sources and I am now starting to build the templates for us data sources. I have decided to give this application development a rest for a little while and return to updating my One_name study. I have also found a website that lists variants of surnames and it suggests the following 56 variants of the LeFever name: LEFEVRE, LEFEVER, LE FEVRE, LEEVER, LEFEBURE, LETHEBY, LE FEVER, LETHEBE, LEFEUER, LEBETER, […]

I found a significant number of Lefevre’s in the Channel Islands, I suppose this is not that unexpected given how close the islands are to the French coast. Rather than incorporate these individuals into the GB database I decided to create one for the Channel Islands only. It is now available here. I have added 81 new individuals to this database and they are now all on-line. One interesting observation is that the majority of individuals that I have found so far are on Jersey rather than one of the other islands. The common name variant here seems to be Le Feuvre but from the records I have seen Le Fevre and Lefevre also seem to be used as common variants by the individuals depending on the records that are looked at. These French spellings, I suspect, are to be expected given the fact that some of the islanders speak French and so I have […]

Today I have added an additional 29 records to the GB data set and also tracked down a few more duplicates and combined their records. It is funny how things change your focus whilst doing this data update I found that a LEFEVER  married a DARRINGTON. What made this significant was that my maternal grandmothers’ second husband (she had 3 in total) was a DARRINGTON, I happened to mention it to my mother on the telephone and she asked if that person was related to her mothers husband. This is something that I am still investigating and there is a slim chance that they may be related in that in the 1881 census there were only 253 people recorded with the name DARRINGTON and only 394 recorded with LEFEVER / LEFEVRE. As a result of this conversation I realised that I hadn’t looked in the 1911 census for my grandmothers husband as the last time […]