My name is William Reeve and I am the Site manager of this Web site. My genealogy research is focused on the following families: Dimitrieff, Viljakainen, Reeve, Morgan and Barnard. A cousin has done a great deal of research on my relatives in the Bielby family. I have entered my family history data in nine separate projects corresponding to major sets of relatives and ancestors. The project of entering my data is still not complete for some branches of the family. You are invited to sign the <Link to guestbook>. Thank you for visiting!
About our family
My family is a typical Canadian family. My father's ancestors came from Britain, specifically England and Wales, either directly to Canada in the early 1800s (Reeve and Bielby) or via what is now the USA (Morgan, Wright, Barnard and others). The earliest to arrive, Miles Morgan, came to Massachusetts in 1636. My mother's parents were born in the Russian Empire, my maternal grandmother in 1876 Finland and my maternal grandfather in 1875 in an area on the frontier between Russia and Latvia. We have many documented relatives living or dead in Canada, the USA, Britain, Finland and elsewhere, however there are also large gaps in my knowledge of our ancestry. I had a genetic DNA test done. The results have, so far, have led to documented links to several other relatives, however there are also many distant DNA cousins whose connections have not yet been established.
Missing pieces
1) There is a family legend, known in several lines of descendants, that our ancestor Katherine Theodosia Lawrence is a direct descandant of Sir John Lawrence who was the Lord Mayor of London in about 1665.
2) I have no documented evidence of the siblings or ancestry of my grandfather, Anton Dimitrieff (Dmitriev), born at Laptina, near Gavry in Pskov Gubernia, Russia in 1875. He had relatives with the surname Zatov, perhaps descended from a sister, but the exact link is not documented. Those relatives lived in Latvia after Latvia became independent about 1918-21.