Page 6 - Just another English family (Sep 2019)

Preface
My father, Keith Soothill, died on 12 February 2014. His death was prophetic in that years earlier he had told his financial adviser to plan his pension on the basis that he would die at the age of seventy-two. Which is precisely what he did.
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As an only child and male bearer of the Soothill name, Keith became interested in the Soothill family tree after his father Frederick’s (“Freddie”) death in 1990. Specifically, he wondered whether there were linkages between all the people calling themselves Soothill. Five years later he embarked on a project to find out, setting himself a 15-year timeframe and an end point of the year of 2011, the date upon which the 1911 census would be released, coinciding with his 70th birthday and before his own forecast demise.
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He worked on the family tree on and off for the next 15 years but it was late in the process that he realised he had to rethink his approach. He recognised that he needed to be much more systematic in order to be able to draw together his conclusions and complete his masterpiece. Of course, that meant that just at the time he had planned to be finishing his work, his efforts were reinvigorated and redoubled. He still hadn’t completed his review of the 1911 census data at the time of his death as you will see in Chapter 4 and was actively working on the early history of the Soothill tribe (Chapter 5) and Soothills throughout the world (Chapter 6) when he died.
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By the start of 2013 he had generated a family tree consisting of 1,456 people containing 832 people with the surname Soothill and whilst it requires further updating there is a reasonable degree of certainty that this is the definitive list of every Soothill that has lived since the mid-17th century globally. Additionally, as he researched the distinct branches of the family tree, he produced a narrative which became a manuscript - the story of the Soothill tribe over one hundred and fifty years from 1861 to 2011.
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