Ian Argall

Ancestors

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Biography

Ian Argall was born in England in 1938 to William Argall of Penzance, Cornwall, and Gladys Fantham who came from Birmingham, Warwickshire; they had married there in 1936. It was unfortunate that Ian did not know his grandparents; his maternal grandparents had both died before he was born and his paternal grandfather died when Ian was six months old. His Cornish grandmother died some 400 miles distant when Ian was aged seven. His father, William, died in 1946 and Ian was sent off to boarding school at the age of 8; in doing so, Ian lost touch with many of his father’s relatives. In post–war Britain, travelling to Cornwall was difficult so keeping in touch with remaining relatives there was poor.

Ian joined the Royal Air Force in 1956, and was sent to Canada for pilot training in 1957. After a tour in North Africa, Ian developed diabetes and his flying career was cut short. He retrained as a Logistician, and specialised in information technology (IT). He married first in 1965 and became the father of two daughters; this marriage ended in divorce in 1983. Ian remarried in 1990 and moved to Munich in Germany where he was attached to NATO for almost 4 years. He returned to the UK towards the end of 1993 and was posted to an IT project in London where he served until his retirement from the RAF as a squadron leader in 1996.

On retirement, Ian became a Committee Member of the Huntingdonshire Family History Society where he ran the publications sales. In that job he introduced Internet on–line trading for sales of Society material. He also set up the Hungdonshire pages for Genealogy UK and Ireland (GENUKI). When he moved to Cornwall in January 2000, he subsequently took over maintenance and development of the GENUKI pages for that county, a job which he still has. In 2005, Ian was elected a member of the executive of the Cornwall Family History Society and in 2006 he was elected as Vice-Chairman of the Society, a position he held until 2009.

He is deeply involved in genealogy with a profound knowledge of the subject and especially as it is applied to Cornwall. He also registered a One–name Study of ARGALL in 1991 with the Guild of One–name Studies . This study had originally begun in 1972 (although it wasn’t until 1991 that he had obtained a Personal Computer to record the information in an organised way) and has continued ever since. He is married to Sandie, and lives in Porthallow, in St Keverne parish, on the Cornish coast overlooking Falmouth Bay.

Sources

Argall One-name Study.