Family Tree
Welcome to the Wood Family Tree web-page. This page contains the History of the Family in relation to the Tree, other information about the Family, a list of members of the Family, both historical and current, and the Tree itself in several forms.
History
The oldest known member of the Wood Family is Alexander Wood, whose birth dates are unknown. He married Marion Johnstone, having two children: Thomas Wood and William Wood. The tree of all known living Woods of this descent stem from the tree of William Wood, but there are several interesting figures from the tree of Thomas Wood.
Thomas Wood had two children, one named, also, Thomas Wood, whose birth dates are again unknown, and Alexander Wood, who lived from 1725 to 1807. Both were Presidents of the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh; their portraits are visible at the College and have been reproduced here.
Alexander Wood had in his line of descent two people of worthwhile mention - Lord Alexander Wood, a lawyer (1788 - 1864) and Dr Alexander Wood, a physician who invented the hypodermic needle (1817 - 1884), who served as a member of the Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh, and is probably one of the most well-known members of the family. His portrait is also here, although it is not available in colour.
William Wood (son of Thomas Wood) married Helen Barclay and had one child that is known of - Andrew Wood, who married Elizabeth Russell, and had two children, Andrew Wood and William Wood. All Woods that we are aware of descend from Andrew Wood's tree, but both William and his son Andrew were presidents of the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh, as were two other family members.
Andrew Wood was also a surgeon, and he moved to India with the British East India Company, where he married Caroline Sherwood. He had two children. One child, James Russell Wood, is the ancestor of known modern Woods. Andrew Wood's other son, also called Andrew Wood, died within three months of his birth.
James Russell then had one child of whom we know, Christopher Wood, who married Helen Bagshawe. His eldest son (of five), also Christopher Wood, had four children, in marriage to Thelma Sewell. While (to my knowledge) none of these children remain alive, Christopher's grandchildren, and great-grandchildren are alive today.
Modern members of the Wood Family have continued the prestigious medical tradition; one example of this is Professor Matthew Wood (F.Med.Sci) who is a professor in Neuroscience and Deputy Head of the Medical Sciences Division at the University of Oxford, who directs the Laboratory of RNA biology and Neuromuscular Disease.
The family tree database is far from complete (no family tree can claim to be really complete). I am currently fairly interested in the pre-history of the family, i.e. looking back to the confirmed origins of Guillaume de Boissay. You will notice that the website bears a new '1000-2025' banner; 1000 is the supposed birth year of Guillaume, with which the Wood Family started. He immigrated to England.
View the Tree
I have finished migrating the family tree from proprietary Synium software to my own 'GTREE'. The Family Tree file is simply a plain text file, so anyone can edit it. I am currently working on distributing GTREE better, but it targets:
- Windows Vista and later
- Mac OS X 10.6 and later
- Linux of either a Debian or RPM based distribution, from 2019 or later.
More specifically, it supports all systems with a Python version of 3.7 or later. It may work on older versions of Python, but I shall not give official support for these. For more information, see https://github.com/smwms1/gtree .
View descendant diagram of ID 1 (Alexander Wood)
Dataset
Gallery
