In a message dated 28/08/2007 20:54:11 GMT Daylight Time, [email protected] writes: Clearly not servants!!!!!!!!! I never actually suggested that any of the Bowes family were servants. Rather, I assumed (never a good thing to do) that with their centuries as one of the major "county" families of Co Durham, and with the Bowes-Lyon's more recent Royal connections, their standing as gentry/aristocracy would be well-known to everyone researching in the county. It was the Grieves family who seemed obscure enough to be either servants or else tenant farmers. My experience in these matters (over 60 years of local knowledge, plus over 30 years involved in running the NDFHS plus a further 30 years as a professional genelaogist, the last 17 of them full-time) still leads me to believe that is the likely explanation, although further evidence is, of course, needed. While negative evidence may be less than satisfactory, I would have thought that the absence of any large number of suitable Grieve references in the County Record Office's very large catalogue would be a sufficiently strong hint that here we have a family that has not made any great mark on the history of Co Durham. Geoff Nicholson