PEOPLE OFTEN THINK OF HISTORY as the great sweeping dramas of bygone days – the wars, the revolutions, the political intrigues of royal courts, the contests of religious faiths, the rise and fall of empires. True, this is history. But when we see how those great events touched the lives of ordinary people – especially people to whom we are related – then it becomes history at its most absorbing - history that truly lives.

Most of our ancestors before the early 1800s left little trace that they even existed. Perhaps it’s a name scratched by a cleric with a quill pen on a fading parish record from the 1700s, or a gravestone so covered with moss and lichens that it has become almost unreadable. Others left wills, letters or, if we are very lucky, a journal or diary, like William Dowsing, the English Civil War Puritan who in the mid-1600s left a trail of destruction through Catholic churches in the county of Suffolk.

This website brings together the ancestral roots of two English families - the Ottersons and the Berrys. The Ottersons' ancestral lines reach into the old English counties of Durham, Norfolk and Suffolk, with one line into Northern Ireland. The Berrys and their ancestral lines center on Merseyside, the West Midlands, Cornwall and Ireland.  Over the past two or three centuries, these families and those with whom they intermarried have spread mostly throughout the British Isles, the United States and Australia

Click on a name to learn their stories. Some of them are vivid with detail. Others are just a few lines of information - virtually all that's left to tell of a life of seventy or eighty years. 

If you have a story, information or pictures to share in relation to any of the members of these families - even if it's just a snippet of information or a story that has been passed down - please get in touch or leave a comment. We never share ermail addresses.