The Book
These pages are the printed family book, Tu Ne Cede Malis: A Family History of knights, gentry and yeomen, reproduced here in full, a page per chapter. Read it in order, or dip into a chapter.
A note on editions: the book is reproduced here exactly as printed for the family in 2026, and the research has kept moving since the presses stopped. The person pages, the trees and the Journal always carry the current state of the evidence; where they disagree with the printed text, they are the correction. Family history is never finished, and this site no longer pretends otherwise.
And there is more to come: a book for the wider world, Afternoon Tea at the Druids’ Altar, is being finalised now. Read the prologue ›
How to read this book
This is the full, colourful telling of my family story: the records and the family's own traditions and legend…
The Name and the Legend
Before the records of my own farming forebears begin, there is the name, and the name carries a thousand years…
The Documented Family
From here, the ground is firm. Each line below rests on records: parish registers, deeds, wills, and the great…
The Damerys of West Cork
My own name has been the hardest line to trace. Almost every family in this book loses threads at the same pla…
The Joneses of Drombeg
Through my grandmother, Alice Dorothy Jones, the tree runs into one of the old houses of West Cork. Drombeg Ho…
The Travers: to Lancashire, and the poet’s sister
The Rev. Henry Jones married Catherine Travers in 1782, and of all the houses that marry into this book, the T…
The Lucas of Youghal: where two lines meet
A small family with an outsized role. By tradition, the Lucas family came to Ireland with Sir Walter Raleigh a…
The Beamish of Cork: settlers, brewers, and cousins
Catherine Travers’s mother was Catherine Beamish, and the Beamish are the best-documented of my gentry lines, …
The Bernards: and kinship to the Earls of Bandon
Through Catherine Bernard, my line runs into the family that became the Earls of Bandon. Her father, Francis B…
The Frekes: to the Tudor West Country
Freke is said FREEK, as in the castle, and as in 'freak,' its very cousin: from Old English freca, a warrior.
The Ryves of Damory Court, and the Swaynes
Twice in two generations my Frekes married a Swayne, and through the first of those marriages the family reach…
The Townsends of Castletownshend
Richard Beamish married Mary Townsend of Clonakilty, bringing in the family of Colonel Richard Townsend (1618–…
The Smyths of Castle Dooneen
Harry Jones married Eliza Hester Smyth in 1861, of a West Cork clerical family. Her father, the Rev. John Rich…
The Webbs: Cambridgeshire clergy who crossed to Cork
The Rev. Jonas Travers Jones married Catherine Webb in 1829, of an English family that had recently arrived in…
The Whites of Kilmoylan, with the Ievers, Lanes, Huleatts and Pennefathers
My great-grandmother Alice Blanche White brought in a Limerick gentry and military family. Her father, Hugh Br…
The Suffolk lines: Channell, Wright and their kin
The English thread on my paternal side comes through Charlotte Louisa Channell (1866–1952), born in Shimpling,…
A word about my maternal line
I have spent most of this book among my father's people, and they carried me into some grand company, into gen…
The Elliotts and Condons of Cork
My mother's father was John Francis Elliott, born in November 1908 at 30 Quaker Road, Cork. To reach his peopl…
The Bowdrens and Treacys of Cork
My mother's mother was Hanora (“Nora” or “Noreen”) Bowdren, born on 24 April 1920 at 37 Boyces Street, Cork, a…
The famous cousins (or, not!)
No old West-Cork family escapes the famous-cousin story. The same small circle of planter gentry (Boyle, Berna…
A Gallery of Notable Figures
The people in my story most worth knowing, with their dates, what they are remembered for, and how they stand …
The State of the Search
A family history is never finished; it is only honestly paused. So before the appendices close this book, here…
The Earliest Known Documented Ancestors of Aynsley Damery, and Their Times
The furthest-back named ancestor in each documented line, with an approximate birth date and the reigning mona…
What Is Proven and What Is Tradition
A plain line between record and legend, so the two are never confused.
Family Seats and Houses
Some of the principal houses and home-grounds of my family, each tagged by how it stands to me.
Principal Sources
My complete, fully referenced working papers, the graded deep dives, the July 2026 research dossier, and the t…
The Family Tree
The interactive trees: the whole family, branch by branch.
The research continues
The printed book ends, and the digging did not. Nine further chapters, written since the presses stopped, follow one household's ladders up the female lines of my father's grandmother's people, all the way to the royal houses of Europe. They live in their own wing of the site.