Do you have information on Bailey, Campton, Critchley, Dearden, Sharman, or Jones?
(The Jones in question was William Jones, thrice Lord Mayor of Gloucester, so it's not an entirely hopeless case.)
A gor-lummie statistic: At the time of writing my data contain the family name, and at least the initial of the given name, of some 10500 people. There are 2350 different family names in the database.
A confession: This great mill of people fall into two lots; (a) infinitely interesting and (b) basically boring. The interesting people are those who are not royalty or aristocracy. The boring ones are the movers and shakers of the 12th-16th century. They are boring because you can find them on many other sites, but I like having them in my data because I read a lot of history and it's a great way to understand relationships between those famous folk. If I'd realised what I was getting into early enough, I'd've kept them in a separate data base. There are now so many links between the I.I. and the B.B. that my several attempts to unravel it all have led to nothing more constructive than a headache. And anyway, how else would I have discovered that Viscount Trafalgar, Vice Admiral Baron Horatio Nelson of the Nile is my seventh cousin six times removed?
A factoid: the 100 most popular given names in my data, most popular first: John, William, Thomas, Mary, Elizabeth, Robert, Henry, Charles, George, Richard, Edward, Anne, James, Margaret, Sarah, Frances, Francis, Catherine, Ann, Jane, Alice, Joseph, Frederick, Samuel, Caroline, Joan, Edmund, Dorothy, Arthur, Eleanor, Anna, Anthony, Peter, Charlotte, Stephen, Philip, Emily, Susan, Roger, Nicholas, Martha, Maria, Jean, Emma, Marie, Geoffrey, Lucy, David, Michael, Katherine, Hugh, Ellen, Isabella, Helen, Christopher, Gertrude, Walter, Pierre, Louisa, Florence, Eliza, Benjamin, Louis, Agnes, Edith, Rebecca, Herbert, Grace, Daniel, Constance, Alexander, Maurice, Harriet, Reginald, Barbara, Humphrey, Ralph, Jeanne, Alfred, Paul, Matthew, Hannah, Judith, Janet, Susanna, Sophia, Rose, Jacques, Henri, Ethel, Christian, Rachel, Simon, Ruth, Henrietta, Fanny, Catharine, Amy, Timothy, Ernest.
The bulk of the information comes from the late 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. The earliest known ancestors of some of the family lines I'm working on lived in the 16th century and a few lines (notably Amyas, Foster, Girdlestone, Kemble, Knyvett, Monk(e)ton, Donne and of course Plantagenet) can be traced further back.
The inspiration and core of the information derives from the work of my grandfather, Jack Barham Johnson, his sister Catherine Mary Johnson (an exceptional family historian), and their mother Catherine Bodham Donne. Katie lived for more than a century, and in that time researched widely and well, amassing a treasure trove for family historians among her descendants. May we who are working today do as well as those who came before.
My mother, Margaret Barham Johnson, later Sharman, has been the main and most active family historian in our family for many years. She has researched assiduously, catalogued and indexed an huge number of family letters, and corrected many mistakes in my data. For this, and for very much more, I owe her a debt that can never be paid. Margaret died on the evening of 3rd April 2002.
The information that they collected and that I have now spent years encoding and ordering is derived almost entirely from secondary sources, or based on letters and diaries, (auto)biographies, published pedigrees and unpublished genealogies, information supplied by other genealogists, or family knowledge of living members of this tree. The information presented in this site is a superficial glimpse of part of this mass of information.
I owe particular thanks to Clive Astley for access to his data on Kemble, Arkwright, Astley and Thomas families, to René Avenier for giving me the results of his work on the Avenier ancestors, and to Beth Bennett née Wiley for sending me the Blyth family tree.