This Overview summarises the development and content of this project from its inception in the 1990s, through its development in recent years in cooperation with William Acton, the genealogist working with Hoare's Bank (C Hoare & Co of Fleet Street, London), to its recent expansion in 2016 into DNA-based research through the H600 Project and the launching of my hoareorigins.co.uk website.
The papers presented in the HoareOrigins website report the results of my project to explore the genealogy of Hore/Hoar/Hoare families totalling around 16,000 members and living along the southern coast of England and in Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire and Berkshire between the early 1500s and the early 1900s. My aim had been to produce a ‘best-fit’ genealogy which will provide a useful picture of the growth and spreading of these families. My wide coverage has been achieved by devising a ‘best-fit’ genealogy to fit a simple data base comprising parish records from the FamilySearch website (except for the FindMyPast website for Cornwall and Plymouth) and census records (1841-1911), without much further verification, necessarily involving many informed assumptions and guesses, but always open for improvement. My hope is that this genealogy can be linked forward to the present living members of Hore/Hoar/Hoare families and that further genealogical and DNA studies may explore how far these families are inter-related from a common ancestor or ancestors by migration on land or by coastal shipping.
Hoare Genealogy 01: Early Work is a progress report on my work up to 1999 exploring the geographical distribution and growth of Hore/Hoar/Hoare families in Britain and Ireland. Parish records from the IGI Index demonstrated that the growth of the Hore/Hoar/Hoare population in England appears to spring in the early 1500s from three principal centres, one in Devon around Plymouth, one in Hampshire around Portsmouth and one in Buckinghamshire.
After a hiatus of nearly a decade in this project and as a preliminary to more detailed research, Hoare Genealogy 02: Hore of Chagford provides a review of the genealogy of the historic family of Hore of Chagford, near Exeter in Devon, which was presented as the progenitor of many modern Hore/Hoar/Hoare families by Captain Edward Hoare in his landmark genealogy "The Early History and Genealogy of the Families of Hore and Hoare" (Alfred Russell Smith, 36 Soho Square, London 1883) but has been much altered by subsequent research over the years.
In 2011 I started my current HoareOrigins Project exploring in more depth and detail the geographical distribution and growth of Hore/Hoar/Hoare families across the south of England. Hoare Genealogy 03 provides an introduction and overview of the HoareOrigins Project, including a critical account of the data and methods used in this work, details of the sizes and origins if the Hore/Hoar/Hoare families found and how many male heirs of each family were born between 1881 and 1911 and might reasonably provide links to present members of Hore/Hoar/Hoare families, and a general discussion of results and progress.
Genealogy Hoare 04-09 present detailed accounts and discussion of Hore/Hoar/Hoare families, region by region. I have prepared ‘best-fit’ genealogies for each of the families, a written description and maps for most families showing their geographical origin and how they had grown and spread by 1600, 1700 and 1800, and in many cases also summaries of the occupations in which family members were engaged taken from census returns (1841-1911).
In the summer of 2016, I launched this HoareOrigins website hoping to make contact with like-minded family members interested in joining in this project. I also joined the H600 Project (found through the Guild of One Name Studies Hore website) which is an expert and active project with over 50 participants dedicated to using DNA-based research to trace Hore/Hoar/Hoare genealogy world-wide, with many links from English origins to families in Canada and the USA. This is already proving very fruitful in establishing links between Hore/Hoar/Hoare families and have developed my HoareOrigins website to provide support for the H600 Project.