I started researching the Chedgzoy name in the 1980s, long before the internet made any of this easy. There were no databases to search, no scanned records, no websites to cross-check. There was just me, a pen, and a lot of patience.
In those early days I wrote everything down by hand, and I will be honest: my notes were not always in a sensible order. A name here, a date there, a scribble in a margin about who someone might have married. I gathered the family's history in small pieces, one fragment at a time, from wherever I could find it.
A lot of it came from people. I sat with relatives and asked what they remembered, who their grandparents were, where the family had lived. Memory is a fragile sort of record, but it pointed me in the right directions. From there I went looking for proof. I spent days in local libraries reading through old records, and I walked around graveyards copying inscriptions from weathered headstones. If there was a source that might hold a Chedgzoy or a Chedzoy, I tried it.
One of the most useful, and most painstaking, was the Latter-day Saints family history centre. The church has long kept vast collections of parish and civil records, and back then they came on microfiche. I spent hours at a time hunched over a reader, winding through sheet after sheet, looking for our name in the faint print of registers that were centuries old. It was slow, careful work, and every confirmed entry felt like a small victory.
For years that was the shape of the project: gather, check, write it down, repeat.
Things changed when I began recording it all properly online, through Genes Reunited. Putting my research into a structured form was a humbling experience. It quickly showed me that a lot of my old notes simply were not good enough. Connections I had been sure of did not hold up. Dates did not line up. I had to go back and question things I had taken for granted for years.
That is also when I started reaching out to other people researching the same name, and that cut both ways. Their records filled gaps in mine, and mine filled gaps in theirs, and between us we joined up a great many dots that none of us could have connected alone. But not every lead held up. A fair amount of what I was given turned out to be guesswork, mistaken dates, or connections someone had assumed rather than proved. More than once a confident-sounding tip sent me down the wrong path entirely, and I would lose weeks unpicking it and tracing the records back to find where it had gone wrong. Collaboration pushed the research forward, but it also taught me to trust nothing until I had seen the source for myself.
There is one quirk of this family that has caused more trouble than anything else: the name itself never sat still. The spelling drifted from one record to the next, and often within a single person's own lifetime. A man could be baptised a Chedzoy, married a Chedsey and buried a Chidgey, simply because three different clerks wrote down what they thought they heard. That instability is a breeding ground for confusion and red herrings, where one person can look like three, and three can look like one. Over the years I have come across the name written in a great many forms, among them Chedzoy, Chedgzoy, Chedzey, Chedsey, Chidgey, Chidzey, Chidgzey, Chedzay, Chedgroy, Chadgroy, Cheedgy, Chedgdzoy, Chedggoy, Chedzzoy and Chadzoy.
This has been the work of a lifetime, and it is still going. More recently I have started using AI to help pick up the slack, and the shifting spellings are exactly the kind of problem it is good at. It helps me recognise when records written under different versions of the name belong to the same person, record those variants properly, and pick through the data far more thoroughly than I could by hand, untangling the genuinely difficult cases and spotting connections I had simply never noticed. It has not replaced the years of legwork. It has built on top of them, and carried the research further and faster than I would have thought possible at this stage.
The result is what I hope is the largest and most accurate piece of research on the Chedgzoy and Chedzoy name anywhere. Every person in it sits on a sourced record, because after forty years I care far more about getting it right than getting it big.
And I want to share it. I offer this research freely to anyone trying to piece their own family together. If you carry the name in any of its spellings, or you are simply trying to grow your own family tree, you are welcome to use what I have gathered. If it helps you find the people you are looking for, then four decades of notes, graveyards and microfiche will have been more than worth it.