Whilst doing the research on the Kent marriage records I came across this unusual parish register entry. I presume this was a double marriage and the couples acted as witnesses for the others marriage and women then signed with their new married surnames.

I know that this site has been a bit quiet of late I have been very involved in things other than my surname study. However, I am now back to my research and have updated the GB dataset to include more records mainly from Kent in the 18th and 19th century.

I was recently doing some research on Kent parish marriages. I came across a first in this study Andrew Lefever married Mary Lefever. They were from different parishes just over a mile apart at opposite sides of Canterbury. I would like to find out more about this couple but I suspect that it will be challenging as the marriage took place on the 15th March 1748 and so more records will be hard to find.

I have updated the India records with an additional 67 individuals. These new records are mainly burial records. Don’t forget that many individuals from the UK served in the British Indian Army and so if you can’t find details of them in the UK dataset it is worth looking in the India records.

It is some while since I last posted an update to the website. I have been working on my data and have just not updated the website. There are many new records in the Lefever (GB) recordset, I have also managed to move quite a lot of ‘island’ individuals into families and also de-duplicated some individuals. I have removed anyone born after 1918 who is still alive / I don’t have a death date for in order to comply with the new GDPR regulations in Europe. I may have missed the odd individual, if you should find someone who is still alive in any of the records please let me know and I will remove them from the online data. As a result of this legislation the number of records has reduced on the site, I will still answer personal enquiries about living individuals if appropriate.

Today I have added 190 new records to the Lefever (GB) dataset. These records are a combination of 19th and 20th century Lancashire records and 18th and early 19th century Hampshire records. I have some more Hampshire records that I will be adding in the near future. These Hapshire records include qute a few individuals with the usual Channel Islands spelling of Le Feuvre so it looks like there were a few migrations from there in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

I have today added some updates to the Australia and New Zealand records. An additional 33 individuals have been added to the Australia database and 2 individuals to the New Zealand database. I found a marriage register page with one of the Lefever entries on it. It contained a total of 8 marriages and in four of the marriages one of the individuals was recorded as a convict. This was not unusual given the dates of the marriages but what I was surprised to find was that of the four convicts three of them were women, I hadn’t realised that quite so  many female convicts had been transported.

I have added an additional 81 records to the Lefever GB data set. These new records are mainly from the late 1600’s to the early 1800’s ad are for people living in Lincolnshire and London / Middlesex. I also managed to delete 5 duplicate entries.

I was recently sent a book of annotated photographs by a person (thank you M.S.) who had made contact through this site. The book contained photos of Lefever’s who had lived in South Africa at various times, I had a couple of these individuals already in the database but this spurred me to see if I could find any more Lefever name bearers in South Africa. As a result the database has increased by an additional 87 entries mainly marriages from the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. The photographs are not shared on this site but I will share them on request.

I recently found some probate and death records for New Zealand. I had not previously found any Lefever or variants in New Zealand so this was an ideal small record set to start a New Zealand database with. There are currently only 23 records in this set but I hope to add more as they become available. The level of detail particularly on the death certificates is remarkable in comparison with my usual UK ones.