I desire to record for my own family the scattered notes and clues gathered from old books, old papers, Old letters, in the hope that they may one day be used as straw for someone else's bricks. Horace Walpole wrote: I am the first Antiquary Of my race. People don't know how entertaining a study it is. Who begot whom?' is a most amusing kind of hunting. One recovers a grandfather instead of breaking one's own neck, and then one grows so pious to the memory of a thousand persons one never heard of before. One finds how a Christian name came into a family, with a world of other delectable erudition. Family tradition held that we were lineally descended from John Harford of Bosbury, who, in the reign of Henry VIII, ?ashes out of obscurity into riches and importance by dint of acquiring spoils from the dissolved Abbeys, but in the third generation his male descendants are blotted out, and his line appears to have ended in Mary Harford.