John Knowles.net

Welcome to the Family History pages. This intro is part of the of the original pages I did some years ago, hence the links to the old KNOWLES and HUNTER family tress generated by the Family Search website.

The now outdated descendant family trees for our ancestors are Charles KNOWLES or James Percy HUNTER  To see where things are now click on any of the family names in the right-hand column.

Details of the four families are summarised in their dedicated pages with background on the discoveries to date. We have added a letters page that contains scans of letters found from the papers of some of the families (more are always welcome). And a page that contains scans of all of the certificates that I have at the moment.

Families

With the recent addition and interest of other relatives, it is probably time to have an introduction to the Facebook Group and these family pages to explain who is who and what is what! The group was started by my sister (Sue McMillan) and me using the information we had been given from a variety of sources as to the real names of our mother's parents who we now know had changed their name at some time around 1907.

Our mother, (Stella Florence HUNTER) was the youngest of the five children whose parents were known to them as James Percy HUNTER and Florence Mary HUNTER (nee JEFFREYS). Through the good work of Patricia Kewley Thomson and her friend and advisor Michelle Gregory Rodgers Allis we were contacted by Pat who revealed the real name of our Grandfather as Percy John THUNDER - more on that later.

Just prior to this discovery we were both looking at the 1901 census and realised that our Grandparents may have revealed their real places of birth, (Brighton for James and Bidston for Florence). The family story was that Florence was born in Santander in Spain - but this was nonsense. Sue realised that there were only a couple of hundred at the most living in Bidston at the time of Florence's birth so she hunted and found Florence Mary ASKEW had the same birthdate and so was most likely to be the same person. Then by coincidence members of the ASKEW family, who had been looking for the lost 'runaway' daughter of their ancestor James ASKEW for decades had accessed a trial version of Ancestry.com to make another attempt to find information. Both sets of offspring were searching for the same person at the same time. This link was spotted by the owner of Bidston Lighthouse that Sue had visited as part of her quest, and he put the ASKEW family and Sue in touch. Sue met some of the family and the connection was made and explained.

Since then my wife Beryl and I have met members of the ASKEW family and hopefully added to both families understanding of this part of our joint family history.

Sue has been pursuing the ASKEW line since then - details are here on these pages - and I have been pursuing the THUNDER line.

Because Percy John THUNDER had two families that are at least a generation apart it means that the current youngest generation of the THUNDER descendants from his first marriage are in their 30s to 50s and are great-great-grandchildren whereas those of a similar age range in our family are great-grandchildren.

Creating a new family tree from scratch after having worked on one for 20 years using the wrong names means that we have had to start again. We will have links to the knew THUNDER tree soon that includes Patricia Kewley Thomson's branch that descends from Edwin Quintin THUNDER who was a year older than Percy. We will also include our own offspring so that hopefully we will know who we are and where we are from.