Name/Title
1972/Hughes: Book of genealogyScope and Content
This book, compiled by Humphrey Vaughan Hughes (Dom Anselm), has no title and no date, but it seems to have been worked on, on an ad hoc basis, for nearly 40 years. The last date on a typed entry is 1961, the last date on a handwritten entry is September 1972, two years before Humphrey's death. Images of the two pages can be seen here.
There were later annotations by Kathleen, but the date which has been chosen for the book as a whole is 1972, being Humphrey's last confirmed entry.
It seems that at one stage Humphrey planned to give the project up, deciding in January 1956 to pass his research papers to his nephew, Joe (Peter Hughes Mack). In a letter to his sister Dorothy in early 1956, Humphrey writes that he is glad to "be free of it all". But clearly he carried on nonetheless.
Joe passed the papers to his mother Kathleen (hopefully in their entirety but there is no way of knowing). They were inherited by Daphne, and given to JMG.
ROUGH TIMETABLE OF THE RESEARCH FOR THE BOOK
Humphrey carried out various piece of family research in the pre-war period (as can be seen, for example, in a letter to Dorothy of 5 June 1935, in which he talked about digging up "dead Vaughans"). It is possible that his decision at that time to begin with the family research was sparked off by the death of his uncle Augustus Fossett Vaughan, the earliest researcher in the family, some of whose papers were passed on to Humphrey by Augustus's son Seneca in 1935.
After war broke out in 1939, Humphrey, who had been on a tour on behalf of Nashdom Abbey, was marooned in America for four years, only returning to England in 1943 - he is very unlikely to have done anything on the genealogy book during this enforced exile. Once the war was over, he returned to the work for the book for almost 30 more years.
