Ancestors of Cley

This site is about our research into the Dew & Jary families who lived on the north coast of Norfolk, England, from the 1600s through the 1800s.

My husband descended from Jacob Jary Dew, born in Blakeney in 1864. As we discovered who Jacob's parents were (Thomas Dew of Blakeney and Jemima Jary of Cley-next-the-Sea), the research, of course, began branching outward, backward, and forward.

While most of the posts will focus on the Jary and Dew families, we will also be posting about other families who lived in the communities around Stiffkey, Blakeney, and Cley-next-the-Sea. We are fascinated by the complex inter-relationships between so many of the families in this area throughout the generations,

We are also confused by the propensity of some of these families to give the same names to children, generation after generation.

Because of this fascination and confusion, sorting through and making sense of all the data we have gathered has become almost impossible. We haven't been able to find a database that would let us cross-reference items to the extent we feel is necessary in order to make reasonable conclusions in some cases.

So we decided to do this website / blog, in the hope it will help us make more sense of some of the data we have gathered. We're also hoping it can help us become more disciplined in the upkeep of our family file, especially with regard to the consolidation and organisation of source references entered over the years in various programs. (For those interested, we started out with FamilyTreeMaker, then moved to The Master Genealogist. A move to Macs led us to GEDitCOM, and finally to iFamily for Leopard. We highly recommend iFamily as a genealogy program for Mac users, especially now that the ability to note associated persons has been added.)

We also hope this blog will help others who are researching these families.