How to read this book
This is the full, colourful telling of my family story: the records and the family's own traditions and legends together, with the legends plainly marked as such: a line I have tried never to blur.
My father, Norman, started this quest in the early 1990s, and fell in and out of love with it a number of times over the following ten years or so. He was aided and abetted by two cousins; Judy Wight, of Utah, whose careful letters carried the American branch's research across the Atlantic, and Edward ("Ted") Dammery, of Melbourne, whose 1979 history underlies much of Part I. (That the three of them could not even agree on how to spell the surname is, as Chapter 2 will show, entirely in the family tradition.)
They all chased the "Damery prize”; the hope of riding the rare name back to Domesday and beyond. It stayed out of reach, and it still does. But my father missed a richness sitting right under his nose, on his mother's side, the Joneses. And behind them a whole gallery of gentry, clergy, soldiers and settlers, reaching back in one proven line to the reign of Henry VII. And with at least one door, honestly marked and not yet forced, behind which the road to Domesday may still lie.
This book was made in his memory, from his work, to close the loop he left open. My work was made possible following the digitisation of many more records and with the advent of AI.
I hope you enjoy the journey he began.
Record and legend, kept apart. The main text rests on records and the great printed pedigrees. Where something is tradition, family legend, or not yet proven, I say so plainly, usually in a coloured box, so you always know which is which. I have not tried to argue the legends into fact, nor to argue them away; a good family story is worth keeping as a story.
Gold boxes hold the family’s own traditions and the medieval legend, cherished and enjoyed as an inheritance.
Teal boxes hold the colourful true stories, a duel, a wanted poster, a death at Madras; documented, and too good to leave buried in the text.
Red boxes mark the loose ends; what is not yet proven, so nothing is quietly passed off as settled.
Relationships, dates and “greats.” I give relationships from myself, in purple, for example, my 8× great-grandfather. A grandparent is two generations back, a great-grandparent three, a “2× great” four, and so on. Where a birth year is missing, I provide an approximate one (“c.” for circa, “fl.” for known to be living). Appendix A lists the earliest ancestor in each line with the reigning monarch of the day.