Oz Warren

Family History – Briscoe and Warren

I’ve been doing some research into my family tree. I’m quite lucky in that my mother’s side of the family, the Briscoes, are descended from ‘nobility’ and that means they leave very big footprints in history that are easy to track. I have a very large collection of supporting information from sources like the National Archive and I’ll try and put these online as time allows. If you have any questions that you think I might be able to help with, then feel free to use the contact form to reach me.

The Warrens have pretty much stayed put in the Forest of Dean for the last 2-300 years, but my paternal Grandmother’s family, (Searl), have connections with Trinidad and Tobago, and Venezuela. In fact, my Great Grandfather (John Ingraham Searl) didn’t leave Trinidad after the 1920′s, but my Grandmother and her sisters came back to the UK in 1926.

My aunt was told by her mother that my great great grandfather, Matthew James Searl, was a Scottish minister who went to Trinidad as a missionary. The second assertion (also from my aunt) is that he married a ‘local’ girl. Of my grandmother’s three sisters, the eldest, Catherine Rosa Eunice Searl, who died when she was 15 of pulmonary tuberculosis, was often ostracised at school because she was the only sister to show evidence of having non-white parentage. Attitudes were very obviously very different then. Interestingly, there was a large influx of Indian workers to Trinidad in the nineteenth century, so there is the possibility of having either African, Indian or South American genes. My brother spends a lot of time in India and reports that he often gets mistaken for a local when he’s tanned!