1. JOB NICHOLAS was born in 1667 in the village of St. Buryan, Cornwall, England. His parents were Thomas and Ann. Full details are not known about them but there is fragmentary evidence of a line of Thomases going back to about 1520 in the village. He married Aves Nicholas, a distant relative from the neighbouring parish of Sancreed. They had a son, Richard.
2. RICHARD was born in 1697. A child of his second marriage was Richard.
3. RICHARD was born in 1738. He married Mary Nicholas, also a distant relative. They had a son, Richard.
4. RICHARD was born in 1766. He married Sarah Boase. They had a son, William.
5. WILLIAM was born in 1809, a journeyman carpenter, was the last of my line to be born in St. Buryan. He had a son, William, in Paddington, W. London.
6. WILLIAM was born in 1839. He had a son, my grandfather, Ernest.
7. ERNEST WILLIAM BOASE NICHOLAS was born in 1870 in E. London. Ernest retired as the Purchasing and Shipping Manager of Anglo-American Oil, an affiliate of the Standard Oil Trust, which became Esso UK. He had a son, my father, William.
8. WILLIAM was born in 1902 in E. London.
9. I was born in 1938 in Woodford Green, Essex, which was the Parliamentary Constituency of Winston Churchill. I am now retired in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire.

 

 

Saint Buryan (or Eglosberrie, in old English) is a small village of about 1000 souls, about 3 miles from Lands End, the most SW’ly point of England, where the transatlantic telecom cables come ashore.

 

A feature of the village is the church, which is thought to have been founded by Athelstan, the first king of all England, in AD 930. It was named in AD 1238 after Berianna, an Irish holy woman, daughter of an Irish king. A group of Irish religious had landed nearby in the 5^th or 6^th centuries, to save the heathens!

 

The economy of the area was based on the sea, farming and tin mining. When tin mining failed there was a max exodus from Cornwall and there are now not many descendents left there of the original many thousands of Nicholases who had lived there. A port in Cornwall, Falmouth, was at the time a major international seaport and many Cornish people, particularly the miners, emigrated to the Colonies, such as Australia, New Zealand and North America.

 

Parish records for Cornwall and much of the British Isles do not go back much beyond the 1500 or 1600’s, so, unless one is from a titled or landed family, it is very difficult to trace ones’ origins before that time.

 

I am willing to try to help anyone find their ancestors, if they can be traced back to the UK.