** Reply to message from Carroll H Clark <clarkw7iml@juno.com> on Fri, 4 Dec 1998 09:44:37 -0800 Carroll, Very interesting to hear from you about your forebears in London. I had not realised that St Stephen's Coleman Street was on the site of a synagogue. St Olave's church was of course in Old Jewry, and was the next parish southwards from St Stephen's. Without doubt at an earlier period there would have been no distinguishing Clarkes from Clarks, but my knowledge on the family only goes back to the beginning of the 19th century during which period our lot always spelt it with an "e". The first I know anything of was Henry Allen Clarke, a clerk at the Bank of England, who was possibly born in Sussex, but lived in Aldersgate Street in the City and was buried originally at the church of St Botolph's Without Aldersgate - not all that far from where your James Clark had worshipped two centuries earlier. I say "originally" buried because some time later there was redevelopment close by and a large postal headquarters was built next door. The rest will be slightly familiar to you. The old churchyard was combined with an even smaller one atached to a neighbouring church and the whole turned into a pleasant little open space with paths and benches for people to sit on, which became known as Postmen's Park because that was where the postal workers took their sandwiches to eat for lunch. The graves were cleared away, and my wife's great great great grandfather was moved out with all the others to a large modern cemetery in Surrey, where a collective monument was put up for them all. So our Clarks/Clarkes could always be related, but until I can get back before Henry Allen Clarke nothing can be established. He was born, by the way, about 1770, and though I have guessed he might have been born in Sussex I only say so because he seems to have married there and his eldest known child Susan was born there in 1803 (she married Robert Timms, a glove maker). What we are told, in the 1841 census) is that he was not born in London/Middlesex. As for my Tacoma Keywoods, you know almost as much as I do. My granny's brothers Fred and Will settled there after working on the railroads, and Fred's daughter Gladys, born Oct. 29, 1912 (I don't know her mother's name and haven't looked for a certificate), died in August 1976. A kind person in WA found me an obituary for her, but reported that there was no will or probate information at the Tacoma library, so I have no pointers to her children if any. Somewhere I have a letter from her father or uncle to my grandmother, written when he needed a birth certificate to apply for his railroad pension, and somewhere too there is a photograph of Gladys and her parents in the Tacoma countryside which she sent my mother (her cousin) when another Keywood brother died here apparently intestate and all living relatives had to be traced for probate purposes. Your other surnames don't figure significantly on my researches (there is an Atkinson who married one of Henry Allen Clarke's descendants), though I have a passing interest in some Drivers who lived at Tuttle Hill in Warwickshire which, according to my surname dictionary, is one of the possible origins of the Tuttle surname. If you are interested there is a very lively genealogical group in Nuneaton who would know all about Tuttle Hill. Enough for now. Thank you for all your interest. John, in Lewisham, Greater London, England