Robert Bickley
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This website is Robert Bickley’s work. He spent more than twenty years tracing the Rissbrook and Bickley families of South Staffordshire, the Black Country and Shropshire, and he wrote every page of the original site himself, by hand, in plain HTML — because plain HTML was what he could write.
The earliest copyright line on his pages reads 1999; the last update he made was in July 2021. What you are reading now is that research, rebuilt so it can be found and so it will still work in twenty years. It has not been extended, corrected or tidied. Where he was uncertain, this site is uncertain in the same way.
What he set out to do
He said it plainly on his own About page:
This is just a small thing we do to help other people with their Family Research in the UK mainly in Staffordshire, West Midlands and the Black Country if we can help you we will.
If you are new to genealogy and wondering how to do it just email us and see if we can help.
Any suggestions or criticisms would be gratefully received.
His place in the family
He never wrote a page about himself, but he left enough to find him. On the Blackham page he mentions “my Grandmothers Birth and Marriage Certificates” — and the certificates he lists elsewhere are Agnes Louisa Blackham’s, born 1883, married to George Morris in 1903. Their daughter Gladys Rose Morris married Arthur Rissbrook Bickley on 28 June 1941. Robert was their son.
So he is in his own tree, placed there by his own handwriting rather than by anything this rebuild added.
Recorded by Luke Bickley, 2026 — not from his father’s research
Robert never wrote down the generation after his own. He married Carol Bickley. They had a son, Luke Bickley, who rebuilt this site, and a daughter they adopted, Lisa Jackson, née Bickley. Lisa is married to Luke Jackson; their family is Charlie Jackson, Samuel Jackson and Sienna Jackson, Lisa’s adopted daughter.
None of this appears anywhere in the archive. It is recorded here so the line does not simply stop at him — but it is marked as his son’s information rather than his own, because a site that put unwritten facts in his mouth would be exactly the thing this rebuild set out not to be.
Buttons, Wispa and Oreo
Recorded by Luke Bickley, 2026
Luke’s cats. Buttons and Wispa, brothers, joined the family in 2019, so Robert knew them for four years. He loved them. They sent their own wreath to his funeral.
Oreo arrived in 2024, the year after. They never met.
- Buttons
Cat · Domestic Shorthair · joined the family 2019
Wispa's brother.
- Wispa
Cat · Domestic Shorthair · joined the family 2019
Buttons's brother.
- Oreo
Cat · Domestic Shorthair · joined the family 2024
Household sibling to Buttons and Wispa.
Their records live on Amoleo · Pets, the sibling site, and each name above links to its own page there. The details were read from those profiles on 31 July 2026 and written down here rather than fetched when the page is built — this site has no moving parts and is not going to acquire one (ADR-001).
In his own voice
His pages are not a database. He argued with the records, and it shows.
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Didn’t take Louis long to remarry.
LouisRichardRissbrook.html -
Must have had a big house for 15 to live in?
LouisRichardRissbrook.html -
I think that Emma Jane Taylor may not be to forth coming with the truth?
blackham.html -
Hoop is a miss spelling of Hope.
LouisRichardRissbrook.html
The last of those is worth noticing. Faced with a name recorded wrongly, he did not quietly correct it — he wrote down the wrong form and the right one, so a reader could see both. That instinct is the reason this site keeps his exact wording behind every date and every name.
The line he never closed
His father was christened Arthur Rissbrook Bickley. The name came from Robert’s grandmother, Harriet Rissbrook, who married George Bickley at the register office in Wolverhampton on 22 November 1899. Robert registered this website under her surname.
He held her birth certificate — it is listed among the certificates on his own page, Harriet Rissbrook, born 1875. Her photograph is the first one on his Rissbrook page. And in more than twenty years of research he never established who her parents were.
It is the one gap in the whole archive, and it sits directly behind the name he gave the site. This rebuild has not filled it in. Doing so would mean inventing the one fact he wanted most.
Who he was
He loved trains. He loved computers and technology — 3D printers most of all, later on. And he loved his family.
He worked at Goodyear in Wolverhampton for many years.
I was fixing his ZX Spectrum, and I couldn’t decide whether to
restore it exactly as it was or to upgrade it. A friend asked me,
What would he have done?
That stopped me, because I knew the answer
straight away. My dad would have upgraded it as far as it would go. He
upgraded his 3D printer constantly. He upgraded his PCs all the way through
the nineties and the two-thousands.
That question is why this site looks like this. He would have rebuilt it.
I don’t know why he started tracing the family. He was always interested in it, and when he built the site it brought his two loves together — the research and the technology.
I love him very much, and I miss him every day.