Joseph Daglish watch

Last year, I was fortunate to find a pocket watch for sale made by the Alnwick clock maker Joseph Daglish. The watch is hallmarked 1814 and has an enamel face with gold coloured hands.

It has now been restored to working order with the help of our local antique clock shop, Times Past in Eton High Street, and is keeping good time - with a distinct loud ticking produced from itsa verge movement.

The name of Joseph Daglish is engraved inside the watch.

DNA Study includes Daglish name

A paper has recently been published by researchers from the Department of Genetics at Leicester University. This looked at 40 British surnames and their variants - including the names Daglish and Dalgleish.

Some years ago the researchers - Professor Mark Jobling and Dr. Turi King - contacted people with the surnames being studied requesting DNA samples. I know of at least two Daglishes who were contacted in this way at the time and provided samples. Under the terms of the study, the identities of the participants are confidential; the results are by surname only.


The results are interesting, providing some good matches with those in our own Daglish DNA Study. These include exact matches for the names Daglish - and some very close matches with the results for the name Dalgleish. This does seem to provide more evidence for a possible link between the names and I have now added the names Dalgliesh and Dalgliesh to the scope of the Daglish DNA Study to try to investigate this further.

The results of the study can be found in the Supplemental Table here, and the full article here.