The kings candlesticks
The King's Candlesticks website was found when making a search for information on the History of Newton and Sudbury, Suffolk. The author, Edward Fenn of New Zealand, chronicals his family of the Fenns, the Alston family and the Julius family.
The website seems to have been compiled using Legacy 9.1 now free software from MyHeritage. While there is a lot of information on the website in the opinion of the author of this website it is almost unusable. The navigation is crap and a lot of the pages are a mixture of images of text that cannot be copied (in the interests of quoting them for attribution) and text that is in miriad of formats.
What family-tree.co.uk say:
There is a more than a little self-promotion going on here.
The King's Candlesticks is the personal family history website of Family Tree reader Edward Fenn and contains dozens of family letters and other data which, he says, are like ‘opening a window to the minds and way of life of the writers’.
There are 30 letters on the site for Edward’s 3x great-grandmother, for example. Edward’s namesake and grandfather, Dr Edward L Fenn MRCP (born 20 August 1843 in Nayland, Suffolk, died 1907), also left an extensive collection of personal letters. He restored Alston Court Nayland, which is now Grade I-listed, and records related to it can be found on the website. As well as providing insight into 19th century middle-class Suffolk life, the family history documents recorded at The King's Candlesticks feature letters from ancestors who travelled abroad or lived in poorer parts of England.
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Although I came across The King's Candlesticks whilst searching for information on Newton and Sudbury I see that there is also connections to Boxford and Nayland.
There is a lot, and I mean a lot, of information on Edward Fenn's website and I can't even begin to try to incorporate mauch of it on this website. The Alston family is featured and that is of interest to me as there is an Alston tomb/memorial in Newton church.
The introduction for the background on the Alston family begins:
1. ALSTON Family Background [26914] .
General Notes:
Mary Terbrack an Alston descendant, genealogist, amorist and analyst, has suggested a "Time Line" of Alston references down through the centuries. In a somewhat unusual approach an individual file is used, for the often random data collected on the family for that century.
The Alstons sprang not from any " Battle Abbey" or Norman baronial stirp, but as Guppy puts it from that "great body of freeholders the yeomanry of the middle ages, a body which in antiquity of possession and purity of extraction was probably superior to the classes that looked down upon it as ignoble." It would be interesting however to know how Guppy carries the antiquity of possession through the centuries when feudalism prevailed, and what exactly he means by purity of extraction in connection with that " thorough bred mongrel " an Englishman.
Lionel Cresswell
Stemmatta Alstoniana Pg 351
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Edward Liveing Fenn
Edward L Fenn Box 51-944 Auckland N.Z. is a Member of NZ Society of Genealogists 0414
Edward seems to have a rather strange (to me at least) way of expressing things, the quote below is an example:
ATTENTION Alston's of America - those of you still displaying in your pedigree the completely false information that you are descendants of John Alston of Pavenham Bedfordshire should desist forthwith for the sake of your credibility alone, this old assumption is now completely disproved. See John Alston of Pavenham BDF [15900] for the documentary evidence and Col John Alston of Chowan co Nth Carolina [543] in the Pedigrees section for the history of this deception.
As the site is not easy to navigate I am not sure what the references to the other John Alstons are????
The references in square brackets
It would be useful if these were explained.
