At the instigation of my grandmother, Sarah Elizabeth Welby, nee Everard, her first cousin Everard Green, Rouge Dragon of the College of Arms and later Somerset Herald, compiled what he called "A tentative pedigree of the Family of Everard, Evered, Everyd, Everett, Everitt of Kesteven and South Holland in the County of Lincoln" which was produced in printed form in 1909.

[The variations in spelling were doubtless due to the illiteracy of the 16th and 17th Centuries the name being passed by word of mouth to the few who could write. It is worth noting that although today we pronounce Everard with a long 'a' in the last syllable this was not always so. As my father's first name Edward, was the same as his father's he was know in his family by his second name Everard, latterly shortened to Evvy, and I remember well that his sister Margery invariably called him Everard with the accent on the first syllable and ending with a short 'a'; this was doubtless the pronunciation used by their mother and it is easy to see how, in illiterate times, it could have been spelt Evered, Everett, etc.]

Part I of this tentative pedigree starts with an Everard in Ingoldsby early in the 16th Century and traces the family to Pickworth and Walcot and in 1595 to Welby when William Everett bought the Manor of Welby from Richard Thorold; his grandson, also William Everett, sold the Manor of Welby to William Welby of Denton in 1677. The family remained in Welby for over a hundred years, with branches elsewhere in Kesteven and Holland, and Richard Everard, baptised at Welby in 1685 moved to Hanbeck in Wilsford where he had a large family; his fifth son, Samuel, was baptised in Wilsford in 1732 and later settled in Leasingham.

Samuel Everard of Leasingham starts Part II of Everard Green's pedigree thereafter no longer tentative. [His grave is to be seen today close to the south-west comer of the Church of S1. Andrew, Leasingham, together with those of his two wives and a daughter, Penelope, by the second wife.] By his first wife Mary (ob. 1762) he had a daughter called after her mother and in 1761 a son Samuel who married an heiress Elizabeth Turfitt of Kirton in Holland and they lived in Fulney House near Spalding; they had four children Samuel (1792), Elizabeth (1793), Robert (1795) and Henry (1819) and it was the second son Robert Everard who succeeded to Fulney.

Samuel Everard of Leasingham by his second wife Elizabeth had five sons and six daughters, several of whom died in infancy; the second son Henry Everard of Postland and later of Spalding married Anne Toynbee of Waddington and had a son, who died aged ten, and five daughters of whom four married and, surviving their father, were his co-heirs; Anne (Gumbleton) b. 1805, Elizabeth (Whitting) b. 1809, Sarah Everard b. 1810 and Mary (Green) b. 1811 whose third son was Everard Green the compiler of the pedigree.

In 1846 Robert Everard of Fulney at the age of 51 marr·ied his half first cousin Sarah Everard then aged 36 and their only child Sarah Elizabeth was born in 1847 and was my grandmother.

[Robert bought the Chapel Farm, Wykeham in 1834 and he and his wife Sarah are buried there inside the ruined Chapel of St. Nicholas.]