This site documents family and genealogical connections to the Ray-Jones Family, in both structured and anecdotal form..
The families of Ayrton, Baione, Burlamacchi, Callaway, Chaplin, Chapman, Coates, Cowell, Eade, Gould, Hall, Harding, Hill, Hulme, Hurst, Jones, Myers, Pearce, Phillips, Priestman, Rowe, Sharrock, Shepley, Skinner, Wagner, Welcher, Westwood, Willoughby and Wood, amongst others, may find something of interest on this website; please visit our full alphabetical surname index for the complete list.
The photos immediately above are of my father, my mother, my brother Tony, myself and my other brother Philip. Follow this link for an important new treatise on Raymond’s work
Works by Raymond Ray-Jones
Sample gallery – click for larger images
Works by Tony Ray-Jones
Sample gallery – click for larger images
By kind permission: Tony Ray-Jones/National Science and Media Museum/Science & Society Picture Library.
Watch this YouTube video entitled “Sofa Sessions: Conversations with Martin Parr – Anna Ray-Jones”
Origins of the Ray-Jones Family
My mother’s parents were middle class professionals from London, and were comfortably off – owners of a prep school. My father an introvert, a draughtsman who became a highly skilled painter-etcher, came south from Lancashire cotton country when he was a teenager in 1907 to take up a scholarship place at the Royal College of Art in London, and then lived a life of poverty as an artist in Paris and London for several years. They met when my mother’s brother, fresh from Oxford University and destined to become a QC then a Law Lord, looked for an artist to create portraits of his parents in 1918. They married in 1926. My father had been born Raymond Jones in 1886, but later changed his name to Raymond Ray-Jones; hence the Ray-Jones family. You can read more about him on the Ray….Jones page.
North and South, poor and wealthy, they brought together two very different parts of England that are still very different today. They had three sons, and all three of us were affected by this mixed heritage, the pursuit of social justice becoming important to us all in our private lives as architect, accountant and (well known) photographer.
When I retired in 1995 my wife and I went to live in Prague and were there for six happy years. I had time on my hands, but with a plastic bag of letters from an uncle who served the East India Company in the 19thC, the family book, a PC and frequent visits to the UK including the Family History Centre in Islington, I decided to bring Allan Nugent’s book up to date. This website is the result, thanks to my son Mike for the website itself, and to many other Ray-Jones family (and wider family) members worldwide who have supplied me with information.
I hope that it will be useful to those searching for information on their own families, as well as to members of the Ray-Jones family.
I would greatly appreciate any additional information you feel able to share so that the site can continue to be improved, and am aware that I have made very little use of the internet, since my research ended soon after we returned from Prague in 2001.
You will find some exotic names far back in the history, but many other inhabitants of this island will share them if they care to do their own research. My interest in this was simply as a detective looking for clues and the satisfaction of discovering where they led, but it is time-intensive work and I would probably not have started it without the encouragement provided by the family book ‘The Chaplin and Skinner Families‘ edited and published privately in 1902 by my great uncle Nugent Chaplin; and the research he used in it, which was carried out in part by my great great grandfather Allan Maclean Skinner QC, Recorder of Windsor, in the 1860s.
Alan Ray-Jones