Welcome to the Colverson Family Tree website - especially if you're a Colverson too or related to one!
My name's Ron Colverson and I'm gathering together as much information as I can find about the Colverson genealogy. Even though it's a unusual name, this collection is far from complete and probably contains much that's not quite right! It's very much a work in progress and this is where you can help me out with more information, corrections, stories, photos, and anything else you'd like to contribute. In fact if you have anything at all about anybody here, I'd love to hear from you.
You can email me by clicking here
or you can send an email to ron@colverson.com.
Getting started
There are 3 ways to find someone here - by the Persons list, the Surnames index or the The Colverson Line. You can click on those links or in the menu and you'll also find the same links at the bottom of every page. You could start with the oldest Colverson anyone's been able to find, Richard COLVERSON (1786 - 1859) and just browse from there. Or just take a look at the photos in the gallery. In line with usual practice, you won't (I hope) find any information about living people.
Each person has a single page about them, listing their parents, their spouse and their children, and there's a family tree excerpt going back to their great grandparents. If any children had children of their own, you'll see a plus sign before their name, indicating that the line of descent continues for another generation. All names are clickable so you can follow the generations, both upwards and downwards, by clicking on any name, just like this one: Richard COLVERSON (1786 - 1859).
What's new
17th July 2007:
- New individuals added
21st December 2006:
- The Colverson Line from Richard downwards
- A gallery of Colverson photos
- Various documents relating to Colversons
- A page about East Meon with photos
- Odds & Ends external links
History
As I said, it's a rare name. In the 1901 census there are only 106 Colverson entries, grouped into about 28 families and they're mostly all here somewhere. The majority of them were in the south, particularly around Southampton where many of their descendents still live. There are also a couple of families in Yorkshire and a small contingent around London.
In the south, the Colversons first appear in the small Hampshire village of East Meon where Richard Colverson was an agricultural labourer. He married Olive Simpson Marsh from the same village and raised six sons and three daughters. Most of his children left the village when they grew up and moved to the large coastal cities of Southampton and Portsmouth where they became greengrocers, fruiterers and coal merchants. Some of them became pretty successful. I've been told that in the 1930's you could see coal wagons in the railway sidings at Portsmouth with 'S. Colverson & Son' on the side. Now there's a photo I'd love to find!
I've yet to workout how or even whether the Yorkshire branch connects to the rest of us - I'd welcome any information on this. Maybe Richard originally came from Yorkshire?
Source of the name
The name itself could be a misspelling of Coverson which occurred when Richard married Olive Marsh - their children just carried on with the new variant. For many years I fancied it was a corruption of Culverson which is another common misspelling. Culver is old English for a dove-keeper and exists as a surname in it's own right, so 'son of the dove-keeper' seemed rather romantic! I'm sure we've all suffered from the bad spelling of our surname but the best one I've ever experienced was from an estate agent who once sent some house details to me addressed to 'Col. R. Verson'.
This site is of course a collaboration so I'd like to acknowledge and thank the people who've done most of the research: Linda Rosser who introduced me to Genes Reunited and so got me started, Caroline Stevens who maintains the database and encourages me, David Copsey who's been researching the Colversons for a very long time, the other contributors Avril Wood, Elizabeth Kitcher, Sara Westwood, my near-namesake Ron Coverson (see his web site) and all the people I've met at:
For those who want to know the technicalities of how I did this website, the data is primarily held and maintained in Family Tree Maker. From there, it's exported to a GEDCOM 5 file and generated into reasonable-looking web pages by GED2HTML using a customised output program. The code is valid HTML 4.01 Strict and uses no JavaScript.
