Hello everyone -- This is a reply to Louise <swaffer@loujupp.freeserve.co.uk> who posted on 21 Feb re: surname SWAFFER in the area of Romney Marsh and Ashford (Kent, ENG) in the early 1800s. I would certainly agree with Roy (who posted in reply to Louise on 21 Feb) that the SWAFFER surname is one frequently found in East Kent. A less common variant is SWOFFER. By coincidence, both spellings of this surname happen to be familiar to me, not because I have a connection to it, but because someone with that surname married into my IDDENDEN line. There are no Huguenot connections that I know of (but one never knows about these things.....). Louise, if you contact me off-list, I can hopefully put you in touch with a couple of people who are researching SWAFFER/SWOFFER. I've even collected some SWAFFER surnames which I can share with you although I'm not sure the dates and location will be of any help. I would suggest a couple of things you can do in the meantime. Since you are only back to the early part of the 1800s, you need to obviously work on getting back farther. If you know where your Thomas was born (Ashford?), I suggest searching that parish and those surrounding it for clues about his family. People usually didn't move very far in those days. It's too bad that Thomas was born in 1835, just before civil registration started in England (1837) but if he had siblings born after 1837, their birth certficates would provide valuable information such as name of the father, his occupation, name of the mother including maiden name, and the family address. I would also suggest joining the Kent Family History Society (FHS) and also the KENT-ENG mailing list. Both are good ways to put out queries about your research and see if others are also researching the same surname. For example, the FHS publishes four journals a year and also a periodic Members' Interests Directory. I would be happy to provide you with information about it. You can subscribe to the Kent-ENG mailing list by sending the word "subscribe" in a message to either KENT-ENG-D-request@rootsweb.com (for digest mode) or to KENT-ENG-L-request@rootsweb.com (for list mode). You might also look in their list archives to see if anyone has posted about the SWAFFER surname in the past. Hope this has helped. Andrea