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Caroline and Jane are sisters, daughters of Richard Gwatkin and Elizabeth Dobbs.
This family is on the Gwatkin one name study website at treesandstars.com/Gwatkin.
I am not sure whether Frederick and Eli were brothers, although it seems likely. I will have a hunt, and add that information to the website once I have solved the puzzle.
All the best!

Hi Beverley,

There are likely to have been several different 'Gwatkin' families, which makes it more diifficult for you to find your Gwatkins

The name developed from the Welsh patronymic system. If your name was Howell and your father's name was Walter, then you might have been called Howell ap Gwatkin. ('Ap' meaning son of, and Watkin being a pet name for Walter. The Welsh for reasons unknown to me, seem to have been inclined to stick a 'G' in front of a 'W' when it was preceeded by the 'ap'. They did the same for William, hence the surname 'Gwilliam'. If anyone knows for sure why they did this, I would love to hear from them! Perhaps saying apgw was easier than saying apw?)

When people had to choose last names in the sense we mean now, some people just dropped the 'ap' or the 'ap G', and called themselves 'Watkin' or 'Watkins', and others, only a few families from my very preliminary look at it, but more than one, dropped the 'ap' and called themselves 'Gwatkin'. (There are a few 'Gwalters' too.)

This is a long-winded way of saying that if you want to contact people in your Gwatkin family, you will need to narrow things down a bit.

I assume that the person who gave you the information about Martha Gwatkin got the information from the IGI. It is not possible to work out from the IGI who Martha's parents were. There are only two Martha's on the IGI records who are likely to have been the Martha in question, and although I know which of these I would favour, the IGI information gives an incomplete record of the people who were around at the relevant time. You would really need a will or something of the kind to give us more of an indication of the direction in which to search.

Thanks for giving me something interesting to investigate!

Ana

Thanks for the information about Custodian - it looks very good indeed. The program might not do everything I was thinking I wanted to do, but it does things I didn't know I wanted to do until I saw it! Unfortunately, my partner thinks he can set me up with Lotus Approach, which seems much, much easier to use than Access (I want to create the tables, forms, links, output formats etc without reading instructions  ), and which we already have (no need to spend 25 pounds). So, it looks like I will be creating tables for a while... Hopefully, I will be able to justify buying Custodian sometime.

Ana

Has anyone tried using Microsoft Access for this?

Family tree software doesn't store the data in a way that allows me to identify links easily. Excel is working nicely, but it is ugly, has limited flexibility and it would be so much nicer to have something suited for the purpose.

If you have tried using Access, I would love some hints! As Mike commented, I seem to have spent longer trying to get Access to work than I have entering data today!

Ana

I have found a James Lutwich born to a Harriett Lutwich in 1837 in Castlemorton, who is on the 1841 census with hs mother, but then vanishes - no further census or death records. Any hints as to how I could sort out whether this is an illegitimate son of Joseph Tombs? (...I can't see how this could be shown to be the case, but just in case you know something that I don't...)

Thanks for being there at the other end of the Post button!
Ana