My Family History

Introduction

In 1970 I started to research my Dunstan family history. My father knew very little about his family, so we started from scratch with his birth certificate. Over the years I discovered a number of previously unknown relatives, and with their help traced my ancestors back to 16th century Cornwall.

In 1995 I wrote a book to summarize my research. Some of the information in the book may be of interest to other family historians, and so I have made a number of chapters available for downloading.

Since printing the book I have continued with my research. I have discovered more about my great grandfather Harry Mainwaring Dunstan and his (unintentional) misuse of the Dunston coat of arms. When I get time I will rewrite Chapters Five and Nine to reflect the facts.


Downloads

Click on the links below to view or download excerpts from my book. You will need the Adobe Acrobat Reader to view and print them.

Chapter One

Origins

Chapter Two

The Early Generations (1599-1783)

Chapter Three

William Dunstan (1755-1817)

Chapter Four

John Dunstan (1797-1874)

Chapter Five

Harry Mainwaring Dunstan (1841-1903)

Chapter Nine

Coats of Arms

 


Acknowledgements

In addition to my own research, I have drawn on the work of others to produce this book.

Chapter Two is almost entirely based on Edward Martin's excellent book Stithians Families.

Much of the detail in Chapter Three came from the diligent research of Pat Cook (granddaughter of William John Roe Dunstan).

I am indebted to Joan Wells (great granddaughter of Richard Jewell Dunstan) for supplying information and photographs. Joan has a lot of information on Dunstans in Canada and the USA.


Technical Stuff

The book was laid out using WordPerfect. I subdivided an A4 landscape page in to two, and then used WordPerfect's Booklet feature to rearrange the numbered pages for printing.

The family trees were produced by a shareware program called TreeDraw (available from SpanSoft).

Individual chapters of the book were saved as pdf files using Adobe's Acrobat Distiller. I have restricted the resolution of linedrawings to 300dpi and photographs to 72dpi to minimize download time.

All my family history information is stored in a database using a shareware program called Brother's Keeper. There are many genealogy programs available, most (in my opinion) are far more complicated than they need to be.


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