The Home Page
of
John Ward

Welcome to John Cameron Ward's genealogical
home page. There are two parts. The first is a collection of McGregor files amassed between 1980 and 1995. The second part consists of my family tree in html. "The wardjc.com support team" has nothing to do with this website. I suggest you ignore it.

My favourite saying is:
Say something! - even if it's only goodbye
E-mail me on this disguised email address (to defeat the spammers)

wardjc01 at optusnet dot com dot au

The McGregor Collection

Probably what you came for, but these are just ordinary text files - not clickable internally.

My own McGregors
The House of Glengyle
The House of Roro.
Ardlarich, a Roro offshoot.
RobRoys - A collection of Rob Roy descents.
NonRobs - Not so. A lesser group!
Cambus McGregors - An enclave near Doune.
Glencarnoch. The line of the present Chief.

Now my Personal Ancestral File.

With Index
Presently (Nov 2005) about 58000 persons are in AQ Mainly in English counties: Lancs., Warws., Wmlnd., Yorks., & Lincs; and in Scotland: Dumfs., Rox., Selkirks., Perths., & Stlgs. A new website is now ready. It is on http://www.wardjc.com, but clicking this surname index will transfer you there. You are not interested in my ancestors, but in yours, and these pages are designed to help you find them - only connect.

surname index

This will take you to a person-index which has an entry for each person , with dates, but you may need to scroll down a bit. If you come to a full stop, click “Next”. Having clicked your individual of choice you will be whisked away to visit him or her, complete with parents, children, ancestors and descendants (both for four generations). The is lots of whitespace so keep scrolling.

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More Waffle

If you see the odd  % or # symbol while clicking your way through, it means that this line leads either to a genealogical correspondent (%), or me (#).   Ask me and I will put you in contact.

There is a genealogical directory at Ifoundit . They kindly put me in their index so I am putting them in here. Have a click! You can do searches using "and" "or", "not" operators and the widcard *. It works very well. Try also Cyndi's list , a good list of genealogical sites on the Internet, especially for UK people.  Another excellent  site for the UK. is genesreunitedted.com.

Thoughts (now historical) on Genealogical Software

Ancestral Quest  (AQ) version 11 is the lastest as of January 2004 and is quite something, especially for someone with 55000 people to look after.  I think the best bit is the new ID number which not only identifies a person, but also encodes his or her relationship with the root person. even by several marriages if necessary.  After a little practice several seemingly unconnected branches were happily regrafted with its aid.

More Historical Notes (me this time).

I was born in 1921 in the grimy Northern English mill-town of Middleton, near Manchester, but in one of its more affluent suburbs. My great grandfather Abraham Lord had made his pile in the cotton boom, and my grandfather, Harry Ward, had married his favourite daughter out of seven, and was made manager of Tong Mill in Middleton, where my father, another Harry, followed in his footsteps. All was serene until the crash of 1929 coincided almost with my father's death in 1930 at the age of only 40. My mother, now almost penniless - maidless anyway - and her young son (me), aged 9, were given shelter by her rich Auntie Annie who has retired, along with her (Annie's) deserted sister Isobel, my grandmother, to the delightful seaside resort of Newquay in Cornwall; this on the proceeds of innumerable pennies and halfpennies slid across the counter of her late husband's grocer's shop in Longsight, another grim Manchester suburb.

Life continued serenely in Newquay until my mother, still an attractive woman in a bathing costume, met and married my stepfather, and I was whisked off to Wembley (of football fame), where he lived. School there was a bit more real and earnest that in good old Newquay, and less to my taste, until I went on a fortnight's cruise to Scandinavia on a troopship. I remember it cost seven pounds seventeen shillings and sixpence, a mighty sum in those days. Life on a troopship was fairly primitive, but I liked it, especially after I got very seasick on the way home (along with 500 other boys in the aptly named mess-deck), and then experienced that euphoric recovery when the sun was shining and the wind blustering over the white waves and the deep, blue sea. It was 1938 and war was brewing up, so I decided, there and then, to be a ship's radio officer (radio was my hobby at that time). That was a great start in life, and lasted until the end of the war.  More on WW2 memories here.

By then I had graduated to manhood, but really had nothing to show for it. I saw the Graf Spee blow up in Montevideo when I was 17. I travelled all over the world; but was this really enough? It was then that I met a chap in a pub in Southsea who was being respectfully referred to as "Doctor". He explained that he was a scientist in the Naval Research outfit. I was mightily impressed and decided on the spot to end my intellectual deprivation. This involved taking a correspondence course for the Special University Entrance Examination as I helped to escort the North Atlantic convoys on the Merchant Aircraft Carrier MAC Miralda, one of the little heard-of MAC-ships. By the time the war was fully over I was installed at King's College of the University of London, in the Strand. Now followed six years of really hard and enjoyable work. This is what I had missed - that and the stimulating intellectual company.

Female company, too. I ended the course married to the prettiest girl in year, and we soon had four delightful children. She told me that all she wanted was babies. She had taken her chemistry degree to please her father, now she intended to please herself, stay at home, and look after them. I dearly loved her for it. I could earn money (for doing what I enjoyed) and give a little help producing babies which was what she wanted.

. Soon we were installed in a fine big house in the Thames-side town of Marlow, but it all fell to bits when our son Andrew was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy and Courtaulds closed their Fundamental Research Laboratory where I worked. A perfect job came up with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Sydney, Australia, so we grabbed that chance and made a new start. It was when I retired nearly 20 years later that I took up genealogy. Margaret, my wife, said on that fateful day, "The first thing you can do is clean out the garage". There was stuff in there that had come off the boat 20 years before and never been touched. The first item in a box of old family papers was a letter from my father to a firm of solicitors about what had become of Abraham Lord's only son and heir, Abraham Parker Lord. My father thought he had died in "Manley". It sounded familiar. "I wonder if that could be Manly, NSW", I thought. I sent off for a death certificate, and, bingo, there it was. Magic! "The trumpet shall sound". Another 20 years and more have gone in the twinkling of an eye, with eight trips back to England looking for family on both sides. My dear wife is now long dead, and the garage is still in a terrible mess, but I do have this beautiful website.

Philosophical Aspects

There are still people around who talk of "proven" genealogies. This has to be nonsense. There is no historical record that is anything better than doubtful. Just think of all the villains lurking about in the past, doing their best to falsify things, let alone the mistakes that were made. Proof means certainty and we can never attain that. The best we can do is to proceed by the scientific method - the method of conjecture and refutation. I commend to all genealogists and family historians the works of Sir Karl Popper, such as Objective Knowledge. They really should read it.

And another thing. There has been too much pussyfooting around religion. People seem to think that what you believe is a matter of free democratic choice; logic has nothing to do with it. This results in lots of conflicting religions, lots of strife, witch-burning and warfare, lots of strongly, even fanatically, held beliefs with no reason behind them, and lots of silly interference with useful things like stem-cell research. Let me just say that this is all dangerous rubbish. There would be no need for it if people would only think.

Lastly: acknowlegements. In my home Ancestral Quest file these are all in the notes but the notes have been left out of the present website to speed things up. Contact me and I will put you in touch with other interested researchers. Special thanks are due to Paul Willan for much early Willan research.

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