Back from England are Tom Brown, his sister Rachel Grindstaff, and Jan Garbett after a week of searching in the Manchester and Lancashire archives and visiting areas where our Rudds may have lived and attended Church in Didsbury, England.
You'll recall Emily Lauritzen's research shared at the 2015 family reunion led us to a John Rudd who in 1698 came to Virginia as an indentured servant, a weaver, departing from Liverpool, England. We have used that clue to search Liverpool and surrounding areas where weaving was a major trade and we now have many addition leads. But documentation was not the only focus of our research. We sought to living Rudds that were willing to do YDNA tests.
Tom Brown says about the trip that we “found some Rudds while we were there that just might be our relatives. One of the Rudds we met named Keith did the test in front of us. His roots are from Shropshire/Staffordshire which is closer to Birmingham than to Manchester/Liverpool but we are hopeful that he's a match.
We also gave away a DNA kit to Sandra Fallon whose mother is a Rudd. She has roots from Didsbury, England which is just south of Manchester. She is working with one of her Rudd cousins to see if he will test. This is Sandra with her husband:
I also met a man named Kevin Cole who has Rudds in his family line which are from Liverpool. Kevin gave me access to his Ancestry DNA results and I was able to find a Rudd that would be a good candidate to test. His wife told me to reach out to him via Facebook but I have yet to get a response. However, I will keep trying him or another cousin if needed. This is me standing in front of the Manchester library with Kevin and my sister Rachel.
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We are very hopeful that we will get some good answers once we get DNA results from all three Rudd branches discovered so far."
While at the Manchester library we were invited to write an article for the Manchester Genealogist. Rachel will be working on that and hopefully as other genealogists interested in Manchester families may give us further leads to more Rudds we could request YDNA samples from. Anyone interested in helping us sort and try to group over a 100 Rudd individuals we gathered documentation on while there please let us know. We want to see if we can put them together as families which when corresponding to YDNA results or yet to be discovered records may prove to be our family. Volunteer by contacting Tom at tnmbrown@gmail.com.
Pictured below left-Tom & Rachel at Didsbury graveyard; Right-Tom, Rachel, Keith Rudd, and Jan Garbett after getting a YDNA sample from Keith.
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