In the 1980s, while living in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, I produced a family history which aimed to show as many of the ancestors of my children, Philip and Julia, as I could find. This included the descendants of ancestors, and with both ancestors and descendants I recorded as much detail for each individual as I was able to find.
I also included the Lowes family whose arms we inherited, even though there is no known blood relationship between the Clark and the Lowes families. John Burkhill Lowes, my father’s godfather, was the last of a branch of the Lowes family living at a farm called Allens Green, near Bardon Mill, Northumberland. Having no children by his wife (who was his fourth cousin) he left the farm, the name and the arms to my father when he died in the early thirties.
I typed up this family history using an Osborne 1 64 KB computer, and stored the results on scores of 5 1/4 inch floppy disks. Unfortunately all attempts to transfer this data into a modern format have failed, and I have therefore disposed of the disks and the computer. Instead one of my many projects is to optical-character-read the dot-matrix printout of the history and reproduce it here. But I’m afraid you will have to be patient if this particuarly interests you. Altenatively you could book a visit to the Mass Observation archive at the University of Sussex, Brighton, where you will be able to see my family history in Box 1 of the F. Clark-Lowes small collection.
