All Peapell that on Earth do Dwell.

Or People, or Peoples, or Pepall, or Peaple

It started with a will, or rather the lack of a will. In 1981 May Winifred Peapell died in Bournemouth with no children and without making a will. Her father had fallen out with his brothers and she was not going to leave anything to the family. However, as she had left no will, the law requires the money to be divided between her living relatives. They needed to be tracked down and this led to the first Peapell family tree. They money was handed out according to laid down rules and an official need was satisfied.

Beryl Hurley's mother (Ethel Maud Peapell) was one who had inherited a small sum from May Peapell. From this beginning Beryl spent the next 25 years developing the Peapell one name study and became a well known genealogical expert.

In January 2011 Kevin Hurley took over the study which  consists of large amounts of paper records and files with some electronic data. There is census information, indexes and details on births marriages and deaths, wills and lots of other records. The information includes variants.

The "Peapell" study is a small but none the less fascinating one - in 1841 the census of England and Wales recorded less than 230 individuals, by 1911 they had multiplied to nearly 500.

My aim

• Preserve and supplement the existing information
• Make it readily available to anyone who is interested
• Make sense of the families and their lives
• Publish in a easy to understand form

When will this be finished? Well I also have a missing great grandmother to track down... Fanny Richards from Newport, Monmouthshire, born about 1866. She married John Crook Peapell in 1891 in Swindon but 30 years of research has failed to find any trace of her before her marriage.