Leaving the paternal branch of the family for a while we next look at my mother’s ancestors starting with the Shepard family. Researching them has been even more complicated than the Loosemores due to the many and varied ways of spelling the surname but fortunately a lot of the hard work has already been done by Nigel Newbery. Census and BMD records appear with the name shown as the most recent spelling of Shepard and the variations Sheppard, Shephard, Shepheard and Shepherd. However thanks to Nigel’s efforts I have been able to short circuit a lot of the work and concentrate on filling in gaps where necessary.