Brough in New Zealand Website.

Hi,

John Brough here.

 

My late father, Leslie Harris Brough, had a great interest in the family tree. He had the opportunity to talk with many older members of the family and glean information about the family - people now dead for over 70 years.

 

Dad wrote up a lot of his research and, after his death, my brother, Kelvin, did more research into the family tree. I intend to put up here the fruits of their research. Some of the versions I have seen on line seem to be a bit muddled. I will also try to get photos of family members for all to see.

 

My intertest is primarily to build a family tree for my children so they can trace their roots. As a result I have had to make some decisions on how detailed the information I should put in will be.

 

The first decision was that I will stop tracing a line when it gets two generations away from the direct line down to my family. It just gets too large and unwieldy to trace very line down to the present time. If you discover this website and find your family line chopped at  a place you would have liked more information you are welcome to get a copy of this website from me and then trace the lines you are interested in. It is a simple matter to duplicate the website and give it a different address so you can control your own copy.

 

The second decision I made as I went along was that I needed to put in the lines that feed down to my family - some of these will have no interest to other parts of the family. But this is, essentially, a family tree for my kids.

 

I will put up two versions of this material:

1. The first will be downloadable. This will consist of two parts:

a. A Generations program that you can download (freeware). It is quite old but is working fine on Windows 7 for me.

b. A file of the Brough family since it emigrated to N.Z. I will not do all the side tangents in depth who married in. Those interested can add more details to their lines after downloading.

 

2. An online version. This will include all the Brough family as far as I have information. Obviously I will only be able to trace the family fully down to my family. Generally when a line down has gone two generations from where my branch of the family has left it I have chopped it.

 

Red letters indicate a button that will take you to the page of the person named. Red links like this at the top of the page saying, "Return to..." will take you back one generation. The occasional BLUE BUTTON will take you back up a family that married into the Brough line.

 

The regression in time unfortunately usually stops with the father of those who emigrated to N.Z. (John Brough of Dublin, Ireland) five generations ago. Kelvin went to Ireland several years ago and found that the county church that held the records had been destroyed by fire. (This was before centralisation in the U.K.) So all else before then remains in the realm of speculation. Some far distant relatives have discoverd some information which I have lifted from the Website: http://www.broughfamly.org  However even this information is in the same generations we are working in. The link on the right takes you there.

 

Kelvin returned from the U.K. with the feeling that maybe the family was French in origin - aristocrats that fled France at the time of the Revolution. In that case the original spelling was either Breau or Breaux and this was Anglicised as the family moved over England to Ireland.

 

Leslie, at one stage, had a conversation with an English professor who insisted that "Brough" with both pronounciations (Brough as in "rough" and Brough as in "though") was a very old English name. This being the case, if Kelvin is right about the French connection, the English Broughs would not be directly related to us - if at all.

 

Clicking on the links on the right will get you started for your particular family branch.

 

If you are a Brough descendant and have a website you think may be of interest to the wider family then I will be happy to put up a link. Email me with a short paragraph of what it is about and your web address.

 

Photos are welcome. Make sure they are in .jpg/.jpeg format and clearly identify who the people are. The more historical, the greater the interest to the wider family. I will put them up on this site for all to see.

 

I will also add anecdotes about people. Dad had a lot of notes from conversations he had with older members of the family. Also the Brough.org site had some info of interest.  If you find any old articles of interest then please send a copy to me with a source acknowledgement. I will put them on the page of the person it relates to along with any photos.

 

The buttons on the right give a sort of tree overview to help you find the branch of the Brough, Le Comte, Jacobsen or McLennan family you are looking for. It is, of necessity, scanty as I am really interested in tracing fully the line down to my family. I will try to include the surnames of those women who married out of the Brough name at each stage - and the first names of the brothers.