I was following up on what my mother, Mary Sarah Canning did. She started the family tree research back in the 1980s and she went back to about the mid 1600s to Henry Windsor and she couldn't get any further at that point. In those days there was no ancestry.com and she had no computer. When she finished with parish records and whatever information was available in Newfoundland, she was unable to go any further and she gave up. When she died in 1996, I had all her papers and I brought them back to England from Canada and they ended up in my desk and they stayed in my desk until the COVID pandemic. They spent 25 years basically in my desk collecting dust. I was shaken out of my lack of interest by a good friend and a neighbor, John Andrews, who had an ancestry.com account. During the pandemic, we all had extra time on our hands and John was keen to look at people's ancestry and offered to have a look at mine. I gave him the information I had and and he went to work on it. I think within a week or so he managed to go back from 1600s to the 1400s, over 200 years. He went back to a man called Miles Windsor, who was Lord Stanwell of Stanwell Manor in Middlesex. Lord Stanwell was an important character and having found him, John handed it back to me and I went from there. I basically worked my way back, over weeks and weeks. That's how I got started and it was John who introduced me to Ancestry.com. One interesting point about Stanwell Manor in Middlesex, West London, it that its lands cover the site of Heathrow Airport today and there still is a village. I haven't been there, but I hope to even though the house doesn't exist anymore, I was hoping that there might be some things in the local church that might be of interest, like family gravestones or monuments etc. 

 

One of the biggest difficulties in doing such research is staying on track. For example in those days people had lots of children because life expectancy wasn't very high and lots of children died when they were young. Many of these Windsors had loads and loads of children and you had to find the one that you were descended from. It was very difficult to do because you had to go through all the records you could find. Ancestry.com has a lot of birth, death and marriage records, because census records were later in the 18th and 19th centuries. You had to rely on church records. Families would have lots of kids and they'd start with one called William or George and if that child died when they were only very young, they may very well have had another child two or three years later called William or George as well. You had to determine that the child actually died and that the one that lived was actually your ancestor. That was a challenge along the way, but apart from that it was just very, very time consuming. 

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The big surprise came as I worked back from Miles Windsor, who was Lord Stanwell of Stanwell manor and I discovered a lady called Edith Plantagenet, 1162 to 1189, whose ancestry went back another 250 years.  When I got to her I recognized the significance of the Plantagenet name which related to the Plantagenet Kings who ruled from Henry II all the way to Richard III in 1485, the last of the Plantagenet kings. The Plantagenets ruled for 350 years ,a very long reign. Once I got back to to Edith who had married a Windsor, it was probably the most exciting moment of the whole thing really, because that opened up a whole range of people. King Henry, the First of England, was her great grandfather and his father was William of Normandy, William the Conqueror. At that stage when I realised she had married William de Windsor, 1158 to 1212. By going back through in the Windsor line, you went in a different direction that didn't go back to William the Conqueror, but went back to William of the Windsor family which went back to the Constables of Windsor Castle. William de Windsor was the first constable of Windsor Castle, a man called William Fitzwalter who because he was the constable of the castle decided to change his name from Fitzwalter to Windsor. He was the very first member of the Windsor family, which then descended until today. These Windsors have no relation to the current royal family who adopted the Windsor name after the First World War. Our Windsor line evolved from Windsor Castle, 800-900 years ago because the person who was the constable changed his name.