Links Family History Blog

Introducing the BRANT family.   In this post, I focus on The British Side of my family to introduce my English great-grandparents (my father's paternal grandparents), Canadian BRANT family founders Jack BRANT and spouse Edith Jane BROWETT. Meet Jack BRANT and Edith Jane BROWETT. The first ancestor in my BRANT family line (see Note 1 below) to migrate to Canada, Jack BRANT was born on 9 February 1876 at 39 Caroline Street in the industrial city of Leicester, England. Son of a bricklayer, Jack was the youngest of two children born to parents John BRANT and Elizabeth RICHARDSON. Fig. 1: Snip from Jack's birth registration recording his 9 February 1876 birth in Leicester, England.  (Photo credit: General Register Office of England, 2008; click to enlarge) By the time Jack was five years old, the family was living within St. Margaret’s Parish in Leicester, at 25 South Church Gate. By 1891, when Jack was 15 years old, he was already working as a shoe maker. His family still li...

Welcome to Links Family History's first post!  With this blog, it is my aim not only to share the results of the past 15 years of researching my family's history, but to collaborate with others with similar research interests in the hopes of breaking through some pretty challenging brick walls.  Future posts will be broadly organized into the following branches of the family: Brant, Browett, Cole, Despins, Elder, Hutchinson and LeComte.  This is not intended to re-duplicate my family tree (which is publicly available on Ancestry.ca  and contains (at present) over 4200 individuals). Instead, it is my intent to focus on individuals' stories and to research family themes such as Scottish settlers in Québec, my recently-discovered Acadian connection, Irish Palatines' journey from Germany to Canada, or Ontario and Western Canadian pioneers, for example. I am not formally trained in genealogy research, so I am not an expert. But through practising this addictive hobby over...