Welcome to our Grandparent Tree, showing all the direct ancestors of our children that we know so  far.  We have information on the following FAMILIES: BALDACCHINO, ESTALL, KIRWAN and BLACKMON.   These are the names of our children's four grandparents.  We also have a lot of information on  several earlier maternal lines, including: VANDOME, FORECAST, SCIORTINO and EASTLACK. Here's a quick  summary below of our families or you can browse our detailed genealogy report, showing each  generation of ancestors, by clicking on the 'useful link' on the right hand side of this page. Also,  just scroll down the page to see an interactive map of where our first three generations of  ancestors hail from.

BALDACCHINO: My father was born in Qormi, Malta and we know that the Baldacchino family has been in  Malta since at least the early 1400s.  Much to our surprise, we think that our family line connects  back to King Frederick (Federigo) of Sicily born in 1272.  From there, we relate to nobility  throughout Europe, like Alfred the Great and the Kings of Wessex,William the Conqueror, Holy Roman  and Byzantine Emperors, a large number of Saints and Kings from France, Germany, Sweden, Kievan  Russia, Spain, Jerusalem and more.  We have a lot to learn about European history!

SCIORTINO: My paternal grandmother was also from Malta and thanks to cousin Roy we now know about  this line back to the early 1600s.  It's another family that's been in Malta for many centuries and  we hope to learn more about its beginnings on the island.

ESTALL: This is my mother's London family, a family that we've been researching for several years  now.  We've been studying the whole of the Estall surname and you can see our full Estall tree by  pressing the 'useful link' on the right side of this page.  My direct line of Estall ancestors goes  back to the East End of London in the early 1700s.  I descend through the marriage of William Estall  and Sarah Bay in 1771 and a long line of Bethnal Green weavers.  The other key branch of Estall's  living today descends through William's brother, Thomas Estall and his wife Sarah Austin. Our family  remained in London for hundreds of years, until my grandparents lost their home in World War II.

VANDOME & FORECAST: My maternal ggg grandfather Joseph Lawrence Estall married Sarah Vandome,  daughter of William Vandome and Susannah Forecast. Both the Vandome family and the Forecast  (Forquest) families came to England in the 1600s as part of the Huguenot emigration. You'll find a  number of other Huguenot names in our tree, spouses of our Vandome and Forecast ancestors.  We also  now believe that my ggggg grandmother Sarah Bay was of Huguenot descent through her Planque mother  but we're still gathering evidence on this connection.

KIRWAN: This is the maiden name of my wife Kim.  Thanks to the work of her late father Don Kirwan  and great uncle John, as well as cousin Jay, we know quite a bit about this family. Her father's  family has lived on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, USA since the mid-1600s.  Her ancestors left  Galway for the colonies at the time Oliver Cromwell turned his attention to Ireland.  We don't know  the specific Irish family that we connect to, but we do know who arrived on the other side of the  pond. We've also recently realised that Kim's maternal great grandmother, Emma Jane LeCompte, is yet  another Huguenot ancestor of ours.  We still have a couple of generations to get precise details on,  but the LeCompte family of Dorchester County, Maryland descends from Anthony (Antoine) LeCompte who  came from France, fought for King Charles I in England, married his French wife Helen Dottande in  London in the mid-1600s and somehow found his way to Maryland shortly thereafter.

BLACKMON: This is the family of Kim's mother.  Her late great uncle Jack and her uncle Bob have done  a lot of research on this family.  Additionally, this part of the family has held reunions yearly  since the 1980s where new cousins continue to appear with lots more information.  Like the Kirwan's,  the Blackmon family arrived in the States long before it was a country.  The early Blackmon  colonists got permission to cross Indian territory to start up their farms in Mississippi and later  continued to migrate west.  Today, the family spreads as far as California.  We know they originally  came from England, but we haven't yet found out about their origins over here.  Our suspicion is  that they started out not far from where we currently live in Somerset.

EASTLACK: This is the family of Kim's maternal grandmother. We've just started a one-name study on  the Eastlake/Eastlack family which you can see by pressing on 'Eastlake Family Tree' under 'useful  links'. Fortunately, several cousins who we don't know have done a lot of work on this family. We  now know that our American branch started when an outspoken Quaker minister Francis Estlake, son of  Samuel Estlake and Marjorie Pentyre of Cornwall/Devon, set sail from Plymouth only a few decades  after the Mayflower. It's amazing that almost 400 years later, we're only a stone's throw away from  where they started out and we've even been able to visit St Andrews, the church that Samuel and  Marjorie married in.

So that's where our children come from! We hope you find something of interest in our tree and we'd  love to hear from you.

Mark & Kim