This is website covers the families of me and my cousin, Michael Stanger. I started 
researching in May 2006 when looking for information on my dad's mother who had died 
in childbirth. Once started, like many people, I found the detective workcompelling, 
and one unexplored branch leads to another, and another...

On my father's side my connections are in England's Yorkshire North Riding and County 
Durham, and in Ayrshire and Stirlingshire in Scotland. On Michael's father's side his 
connections are from Rutland and Northamptonshire in England, and rather more 
prestigious. Reputedly the natural father of his Stanger grandfather (and great 
uncles) was the unmarried Geoffrey Palmer of Carlton Hall, 7th Baronet, whose direct 
ancestors include the Watsons (or Sondes) of Rockingham Castle, the Plantagenet Kings 
of England, William the Conqueror, Alfred The Great, King Canute, and Duncan in 
Scotland.

In Scotland my ancestors are mainly from the Dalry area of Ayrshire. Along with a 
third of the population most of them were employed in the domestic handloom weaving 
industry. Prosperous before the Napoleonic Wars, from the 1820's weavers suffered 
extreme poverty due to the labour glut from returning servicemen and massive Irish 
immigration, which combined to drive down wages.  This was compounded by the 
relentless growth of industrial mechanisation that drove down piece prices. Though 
born into a Scottish weaving family, my 3x grandfather John Bryce became a blacksmith 
in the booming mining industry of the area. His skills were transferable from the iron 
and coal mining of Ayrshire to the lead mining industry in the Eskdale area of 
Yorkshire's North Riding. John and wife Elizabeth had lost five children in infancy in 
Dalry and Kilbirnie, but one son, James, survived to make the move south. James' 
wife's family and recent anscestors were Teesside and North Riding stonemasons, 
potters, farmers, Whitby mariners and ironstone and lead miners.

On our mothers' side Michael and I share ancestors from the rural English East 
Midlands counties of Northamptonshire and Buckinghamshire. Here we share 7x 
grandfather Thomas Manning from Ringstead, near Thrapston, with distant cousin 
Margaret Hilda Roberts, Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven, who became the first female 
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

Many of our East Midlands forbears were agricultural labourers. This was no Constable 
rural idyll, especially after the Napoleonic Wars, when a variety of factors conspired 
to reduce much of the agricultural population to poverty and cramped living conditions 
in tiny terraced cottages. Serfdom in the past became pauperism in the 19th century. 
Women in the family often supplemented family income as lace makers, but 19th century 
mechanisation effectively made their work uneconomic, adding to the general poverty of 
the era. Northamptonshire has long been a centre of boot and shoe making, so we have 
plenty of shoe makers too, and a couple of lines of carpenters and wheelwrights. Shoe 
making, one of the last cottage industries, and among the last to be unionised, was 
also amongst the poorest paid. Contemporary c19th reports put Northants cottages as 
amongst the most cramped in England. In many ways this was the century that defined 
the English working class, with decline in agricultural employment and cottage 
industries and the growth of towns and factories, which gave conditions for the labour 
movement to thrive. Indeed, Ringstead provided one third of the 115 Raunds boot makers 
who petitioned Parliament in 1905 in the first ever march of it's kind by an organised 
body.

Carrying the name Bryce makes me a clansman of the MacFarlanes. But then, as Thomas 
Bryce seems to have deserted ggg grandmaw Betty after getting her in the family 
way, I suppose we would be more assocoiated with her Chalmers folk and Clan Cameron. 
Not such a bad thing maybe, because not for nothing is the full moon known as the 
McFarlane lantern...they were cattle rustlers.

But as McFarlane clansfolk say,
Loch Sloy (Springtime's comin')
Richard Bryce

Thanks to: Don and Marion Chapman, Ken Stanger, Howard Umph, Forrest Manning,
Tanya Harrington, Norman Bellamy, Wendy Birt, Jacki Brooks, Rosalind Bolton, 
Alan Clarke, Trevor Hewson, Paul Joiner, Sally Edwards, Ruth Enns, Marion 
Fielding, Meg Greenwood, Sandy Hall, Lynn Jones, Debbie McCollum, Mary Paton, Allan 
Scotson, Shelly Shock, Mark Stevens, Dianne Sutton, Susan Tall, Mary Taylor, 
Gus Wilde, Jenny Williams, and anyone I've missed (my apologies).