A tiny detail – for an important life

As most family researchers know, there are those moments when a small detail, freshly uncovered, simply takes our breath away.

This was my moment, a few weeks ago, transcribing the Will of Reverend Robert Bamford, Vicar of Mugginton parish in Derbyshire, which he wrote in December 1625. He named his wife Mary, “her sonnes” and her former husband “Mr Cotton”. Most crucially, he bequeathed a book, his “Hebrew Concordance”, to his wife’s son Mr John Cotton………..

Anyone living in Boston, Massachusetts or any Brit with interest in our most eminent Puritans is likely to pause, as I certainly did, at reading that.

For moments I wondered, disbelievingly, if this could be Rev John Cotton (1584-1652), noted Hebrew scholar, born in Derby, beloved minister of Boston St Botolph in Lincolnshire, pursued by Archbishop Laud for non-conformity to the point of enforced emigration (secretly in disguise) and after whose parish the City of Boston, Massachusetts was named.

In the US, that Rev John Cotton is famous, as one of the founding and most influential Puritans of New England – in Britain by contrast, he’s almost unknown. But, along with further evidence, this detail in Rev Robert Bamford’s Will throws new light on John Cotton’s biography and refutes a widely assumed detail about his family.

The birth and baptism

Rev John Cotton was the son of Derby lawyer Roland Cotton and his wife Mary Hulbert, baptised on 15^th December 1584 at St Alkmund’s church in Derby. No scholars dispute that this is the famous Puritan’s baptism (though some say the year was 1585 – the register shows clearly it was 1584). Roland had married Mary on 16 August 1582 at the same church. They had four children baptised there: Mary, John, Roland jnr and Thomas.

Father Roland’s death and Will

Roland died fairly young, buried at St Alkmund’s on 21 April 1604. At that date, his 20 year-old son John was in the midst of education at Cambridge University. Roland’s Will, written a few months before his death, leaves his main estate in Derby to John, with money bequests to his other two sons. No daughter Mary is named (nor in Rev Robert’s Will), and with no marriage found for her before 1604, it seems likely she had died before her father.

The Bamford-Cotton marriage

On 3 August 1608 at St Alkmund’s church in Derby, four years after Roland Cotton died, Robert Bamford married Mary Cotton.

This register entry does not tell us anything about the bride and groom, but no other marriage for people with these names has been found – anywhere in the UK, at a suitable date, let alone in the right place, ie. Derby.

Many online biographies suggest that this Mary in the marriage entry was the daughter and first-born of Roland and Mary Cotton. It is a logical deduction, though without any proof, and the contents of Rev Robert Bamford’s Will as mentioned above prove that his wife Mary was not a young, unmarried woman but the widow of a “Mr Cotton” with sons from that marriage including “Mr John Cotton”.

Mr John Cotton

It’s worth noting that in 1625, when Rev Robert wrote his Will, the honorific ‘Mr’ was frequently used, not only for ‘gentlemen’ (as John Cotton had become on inheriting his father’s estate) but also for ordained and beneficed ministers. In 1625, he had been the vicar and licensed preacher at Boston St Botolph for 13 years, having left Emmanuel College, Cambridge in 1612. There he had been a tutor and Dean, and a renowned Hebrew scholar.

The bequest of Rev Bamford’s Hebrew Concordance was therefore most appropriate.

John Cotton remained minister at Boston St Botolph until 1633, when he went into hiding, subsequently escaping Laud’s clutches by sailing with wife Sarah to New England on the ship Griffin, bound for Boston, Massachusetts. They travelled with fellow Puritans Thomas Hooker, Samuel Stone & their families and more than a hundred others. Cotton and Hooker remained incognito until the ship was well out to sea. (These details from Hooker descendant Deborah Hart Stock in her unpublished Thomas Hooker timeline).

Once in New England, however, Rev John fully developed his already-established reputation as a foremost godly preacher and theologian, known after his death in 1652 as the Puritan Patriarch of New England (https://bostonstory.co.uk/chapters/11-20/14-the-revd-john-cotton/reverend-john-cotton.html)

With Cotton scholars keen to know accurate family facts, the tiny detail from Rev Robert Bamford’s Will tells us with certainty what happened to John Cotton’s mother after Roland’s death. In 1608, she married the minister of both Mugginton All Saints and Pinxton St Helena in Derbyshire, and in 1629, within a few weeks of each other, they were buried together at Pinxton.

Full source details, transcripts of Wills and further biographical information is available on request to celiarenshawATgmail.com.

Treasure Trove – Derbyshire Clergy Lists

Behind every entry in every English parish register, there’s a Clergyman (or woman from 1994). It’s such an obvious fact, but in our quest for ancestral baptisms, marriages and burials, it’s easy to lose sight of the thousands of guys who carried them out and (mostly) recorded the details. We have them to thank, and their parish clerks, for this vital information about our everyday ancestors over six centuries, which we would struggle to find anywhere else. We also have Thomas Cromwell to thank, he of ‘Wolf Hall’ in Hilary Mantel’s books and TV series, who in 1538 made it a legal requirement for parish registers to be kept.

Beyond that duty of record-keeping, however, Church of England clergy in the past had an importance and influence on their flocks we may not recognise or consider in our more secular times. Who they were, how educated and appointed, their level of education, decency and morality, personal leanings in Christian faith and adherence or not to monarchs’ and Bishops’ dictates – all of this impacted massively on their parishioners for centuries. Decisions and actions of our ancestors were influenced and even compelled by these local spiritual leaders.

So, it’s rather important to know more about them.

Derbyshire Clergy

For those of us researching in Derbyshire, there’s a little-known but hugely important resource, created by historian Dr. Richard Clark over years of study and investigation into all manner of Church of England and related records. The size of this work is simply staggering. For every parish, chapelry and peculiar in the county, he has listed all the discoverable incumbents since 1538, initially through to the 1660s, now extending into the 18^th century, providing details when known of their lives and careers. Here are two brief examples from one parish, Derby All Saints:

fl 1552-60
Roger BARTOLOMEW noted as serving the cure in a pension list of 1552 and the visitation call book of 1558; subscribed at Derby to the Elizabethan Church Settlement 19 Sep 1559; buried 29 May 1560; will 16 May 1560, inventory 30 May 1560; he had been the priest of the Holy Trinity Gild within All Saints Church and received a pension of 66s 8d a year on its dissolution in 1548.

25 Sep 1621
Gervase HALL subscribed as curate; possibly [actually definitely] the Mr HALL usher of Nottingham High School 1610, appointed by the bailiffs and burgesses headmaster of Derby School; vicar of Elvaston 1612-21; in 1627 as preacher and curate of All Saints he acted as surrogate for the vicar-general of the diocese; had left the cure by June 1632.

In a similar style to the Victoria County History parish histories, Richard provides full source details for every statement made for each cleric.

Where to find the Clergy Lists

In 1984, 2004 and 2006, the Derbyshire Archeological Journal (DAJ) published ‘Lists of Derbyshire Clergymen 1558-1662’ covering parishes A-D and these can be downloaded for free from the DAJ website:

1984: https://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/archiveDS/archiveDownload?t=arch-2300-1/dissemination/pdf/104/DAJ_v104_1984_019-061.pdf
This includes an Introduction and explanation of Abbreviations.

2004: https://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/archiveDS/archiveDownload?t=arch-2300-1/dissemination/pdf/124/DAJ_v124_2004_258-284.pdf

2006: https://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/archiveDS/archiveDownload?t=arch-2300-1/dissemination/pdf/126/DAJ_v126_2006_169-196.pdf

Richard’s article about creating these lists is available at the CCED website (Clergy of the Church of England Database): ‘Clergy lists, chapels and curates: some observations made and problems defined from Derbyshire 1558-1662’ (2007).

Richard has said the DAJ or DRS (Derbyshire Record Society) planned to publish the lists for all parishes but for various reasons this hasn’t happened. Over years, for my own Derbyshire researches, I have asked him personally for rather a lot of the unpublished E-Y parish lists, and I will supply a copy of any of the following on request (using my email address celiarenshawATgmail.com):

Elvaston
Fairfield
Foremark & Ingleby
Great Longstone
Heage
Heanor
Horsley
Ilkeston
Kirk Ireton
Long Eaton
Longford
Marston on Dove
Mickleover
Morley
Newton Solney
Normanton by Derby
North Wingfield
Osmaston by Derby
Repton
Risley
Sawley
Spondon
Sutton on the Hill
Swarkestone
Trusley
Turnditch
Wirksworth
Youlgreave
Wilne

Richard can also be contacted at his email address: clark.richard456ATgmail.com.

As a concluding example of the compelling influence of a committed clergyman, sufficient to persuade a whole flock to join him in New England, here is Richard’s description of Rev Adam Blakeman (or Blackman) who briefly lectured at Heage (and I have a load more info about him on file from my own research, which I’m happy to share):

fl 1636
Adam Blakeman lecturer; from Gnossal, Staffs, matriculated Christ Church, Oxford 1617 aged 19, BA 1618; subscribed 14 June and ordained deacon 15 June 1617 by John Bridges bp of Oxford; curate at Great Bowden, Leics, described by Cotton Mather as ‘a useful preacher of the gospel, first in Leicestershire, then in Derbyshire’; a son baptised at Duffield in 1630; sailed to New England ‘from that storm that began to look black upon him’ with ‘a desirable company of the faithful’; ‘first at Guilford’ and then the founding pastor of a gathered church at Stratford, Connecticut 1639, where he was joined by emigrants from Derbyshire, mainly Ilkeston; remained there until his death in 1665.
Sources: Lichfield Record Office (now Staffs RO), B/V/1/57; Foster (Alumni Oxoniensis) p136; CCED; Derbys RO D2402/PI/1; Cotton Mather, Magnalius Christi Americana or the Ecclesiastical History of New England (Hartford, 1853 ed) p396; personal communications from Dr William M Baillie and Jane E Wilcox.

Tyler brickwall dissolves

Miracles can happen in the unlikeliest of moments. My latest miracle arrived as an email to my phone while I sat waiting with two hundred others, sweating and impatient in a boiling hot boarding area, for a delayed evening flight from Bristol to Edinburgh.

It was a response from the Bewdley Historical Research Group (near Kidderminster, Worcestershire) who I’d asked the day before for any info they might hold about my long-standing brickwall 3xgreat-grandfather John Tyler (c1791-1837). John, with his wife Betsy Steward (nee Pountney) had baptised seven of their nine children in Bewdley during the 1820s, when his occupation was Clerk, most likely acting as Agent for water conveyancers at the Severn-Side, along the busy river running through Bewdley.

And, glory be, did the BHRG have info! A member named Lizzie reported to me the ocean of details that she and fellow researchers had unearthed about John, his father Edward Tyler, owner of several river barges, mother Mary Whitney, and their other seven children, most of whom sadly died young or unmarried. John was actually the only child of Edward and Mary to continue the Tyler name. Like this:

Wal & Maud my mother’s parents

In the space of five minutes that it took me to read Lizzie’s email, I was morphed from nearly 25 years of no knowledge about John’s origins to everything I could hope to know.

Lizzie confirmed that no baptism can be found anywhere for John in c1791 [hence the brickwall] but records for Bewdley manor and the Wills of relatives tell us explicitly he was a son of Edward and Mary, and married Betsy Steward Pountney. Bewdley manor records are extraordinarily detailed in their recital of families – parents, children, grandchildren and married-ins. They leave no doubt of John’s parentage, wife and sibs, only the new question of where his father Edward Tyler and mother Mary Whitney came from and who their parents were. The ongoing quest of genealogy.

Huge thanks to Bewdley Historical Research Group and Lizzie in particular.

I would love to hear from anyone who shares an interest in these families and the Bewdley area. Please leave a comment below this post, or email me: celiarenshawATgmail.com.

Black Loyalists in Nova Scotia, and my DNA

In 1783, a man named Harry Washington arrived in Nova Scotia from New York. In 1792 he sailed from the port of Halifax, one of 1,196 settlers of Nova Scotia who had agreed to re-establish the previously ill-fated colony of Freetown in Sierra Leone. Harry was born around 1740 near the Gambia river in West Africa, abducted in 1760, transported over the Atlantic to be bought, sold and moved about in the southern states of colonial (British) America. His final enslaver was George Washington, later first President of the new United States, who owned Harry at his Mount Vernon estate in Virginia.                      

During the Revolutionary War, Harry was one of many enslaved Africans who escaped their owners and joined the British forces, being offered freedom, arms and a chance to fight as ‘Black Loyalists’. Harry was a corporal in the Black Pioneers. In 1783, at the end of the War, the British transported thousands of these self-emancipated African-Americans firstly to New York then to Nova Scotia in British Canada. There were promises of good land and fully free lives alongside White freeholders. As we hear so often, those promises were barely kept and penalising conditions were applied. As a result of which, Harry and 1195 other Black Nova Scotians crossed the Atlantic back to their African homeland, for the chance of better prospects in Freetown.

For more on this slice of history, see:

• The Black Loyalist Heritage Centre, part of the Nova Scotia Museum: https://blackloyalist.com/
• Black and British – A Forgotten History, by David Olusoga, Pan Books 2017, pages 188-197. Also features in David’s BBC TV series of the same name, presently available on BBC iplayer.
• Nova Scotia Archives: https://archives.novascotia.ca/africanns/results/?Search=&SearchList1=2

DNA testing brings history home

At first, we might think that Harry’s story is interesting but perhaps has little relevance to family research of those like me, White Brits on the European side of the Atlantic. But this history of Black Loyalists who escaped enslavement and settled in Nova Scotia, or sailed on to Sierra Leone, has come home to me in the most personal way. I think that other researchers with entirely British and European DNA, might find they are similarly connected.

Among the DNA matches on my mother’s side who I have checked on Ancestry and MyHeritage for their ‘origins’ or ‘ethnicity’, I have identified 70 cousins so far whose DNA includes significant percentages of African origins, from about 20% up to about 75%, the other percentages usually being of White European origin, especially British [English, Scottish, Irish and Welsh]. So far, almost all these cousins sharing family trees or personal details indicate they are African-American. Just one has a Caribbean history. Only a few are living in the UK.

Three of these Black cousins have trees that show Nova Scotian residence and ancestral events, and a colonial-period origin in Virginia. They also share with me further African-American matches resident now in America, especially North Carolina, some of whom are their 1^st and 2^nd cousins. One of the three shows evidence that their surname is that of their colonial (British) enslaver ancestor.

For these cousins, their DNA is shared among a list of countries of origin along the north-west and western coasts of the African continent – from where the majority of people were abducted or purchased by enslavers. Being sold all over the Americas to locations where other enslaved people from different parts of Africa were held, it’s understandable they formed ‘geographically diverse’ partnerships and families together in the course of more than two centuries… until today when that enslavement history is visible in their DNA results – and linked by their White DNA to a British cousin like me.

Reasons why

Five years ago, when I first discovered an African-American cousin (M) on FamilyTreeDNA, resident in Maryland and born in Charlottesville, Virginia, I was knocked sideways. How on earth could this be true? Then I found some more Black cousins, among matches I shared with M on GedMatch as well as FTDNA and Ancestry. Then his family shared with me their own DNA matches on those websites and I saw how very many of their ancestors and cousins were White: this connection which was a complete surprise to me was their disturbing fact of life. So – how can British DNA turn up among so many African-Americans, with potential shared ancestry from the earliest possible dates – reckoned historically as 1619 in Jamestown, Virginia. These are among the reasons:

• Britain’s imperial and colonial history means we have travelled and settled almost everywhere in the world, frequently inter-partnering with ‘locals’.
• That same British history before the 19^th century includes significant diaspora to the Americas of Scottish, Irish (especially Protestant Northern Irish) and also Welsh people, a result of their different histories much affected by English over-rule.
• As an example, during the 18^th century particularly, many Scots and northern Irish in growing populations faced fewer opportunities for farming or as servants, and other trades or professional roles, so looked overseas for work and fortune. They were disproportionately participants in Britain’s trading and ownership of African human beings, as overseers, agents, physicians, servants both indentured and free, builders, engineers, seamen on ‘slave ships’, abductors, soldiers, and domestics, as well as younger sons of the wealthiest merchants and enslavers.
• In both America and Britain, we seem to ‘forget’ that until 1776, with the Declaration of Independence, and 1783 when Britain lost the Revolutionary War, most enslaver residents of the American colonies would still have identified as British, with relatives, friends and business associates ‘back home’. Brits were the major founders of plantations in the South’s slavery states and owners of enslaved people in the North. These enslaver colonials had ‘British’ DNA which passed down through the descendants of enslaved women they impregnated. (Almost always rape of course, the blunt truth of how most enslaver/enslaved impregnation happened. Some liaisons of free Blacks with White people did occur but in far, far fewer numbers).

So those of us who are the White descendants of Britain’s colonial and slave-trading Empah, need never be surprised to find Black or Brown cousins among our DNA matches, especially those with African-American, African-Caribbean and British-Asian roots.

Reparative Genealogy

The numbers of my African-American cousins make it interesting and important for me to dig for our ancestral connections. But all of us who attempt it can also contribute to growing numbers of projects to engage Black and White researchers together in these efforts. These are given varying descriptions, such as reparative genealogy, acknowledgement genealogy, ancestral healing, healing genealogy, ancestral repair.

The foundation of these projects is acknowledgement and acceptance that our personal and broader histories are entirely shared, mostly for the worst of reasons though sometimes for free and positive ones. As a result, records of our connections are to be found just about everywhere in the world, especially in Britain where they are most likely to be the records of the wealthiest enslavers – aristocracy and gentry, merchants, ship owners, planters plus their families, associates and senior servants. They can be in the form of Wills, property deeds, chancery cases, debt and bankruptcy details, shipping and taxation records, family, company and plantation accounts, surveys, journals, newspapers, and more.

Among their records too, we can find the humbler White ancestors, those most likely to be in British family trees – the servants and workers (frequently indentured, perhaps transported for reasons of crime, faith, war or politics), and soldiers and seamen (often pressganged). Alongside these ‘enablers’, described with their own names and details, the accounts list enslaved people as objects (‘chattels’) and named, if at all, by their abductors and owners. But these records can tell us how, when and where enslaved people were purchased and abducted, their ship of passage, and sold on arrival (if they hadn’t died on the way) at ‘slave ports’ and in ‘slave markets’ to colonial British and European plantations and households.

Any clues which White researchers unearth from British and American records in collaboration with African-American descendants of enslaved ancestors can move us all closer to finding the facts about their forebears’ lives and even ultimately their roots in Africa. While talk of ‘reparations’ ebbs and flows, here and abroad, any of us can contribute to repair and acknowledgement simply through our own family detective work.

Useful websites

10 Million Names Project: https://10millionnames.org/
Henry Louis Gates’ Slave Voyages: https://www.slavevoyages.org/
Transatlantic Slave Trade Database: https://www.slavevoyages.org/voyage/database

Monumental Debate

Five years ago, on 7 June 2020, the statue of merchant, enslaver and philanthropist Edward Colston was thrown into Bristol harbour, thereby making him known to millions around the world and not just Bristolians. Along with all else that Black Lives Matter movements sought to protest and illuminate, the Colston event fired passionate debates around civic monuments and statues. People of the past, who we often barely notice, so used to them as we are on plinths, plaques, street names and civic buildings, were facing criticisms and offended support like never before.

Needless to say, these were mostly white, wealthy men. Examine their life stories, as various projects around Britain are doing, in very many cases, we find their wealth was the reward of British trading and ownership of enslaved African people, especially in the production of tobacco, sugar, cotton and rum in the Caribbean and Americas.

Now living in Stirling, I’m gradually learning more of the historical facts about this  country’s role in enslavement including a short online course with Glasgow University focused on Scotland’s connections to slavery, particularly in and around Glasgow.

Mid-way through the course, the question of monuments and statues to past enslavers was debated by our tutor and study group: whether to remove them, or keep them but with factual details prominently displayed (‘retain and explain’), put them all in a public ‘statue graveyard’, take them into museums with explanatory displays, replace them with fresh, alternative monuments or plaques, either permanently or on a freshening rotation (similar to the 4^th plinth in Trafalgar Square). Most importantly – with no easy answers in our group – if new monuments are to be displayed, who would be celebrated, and how?

Standing in this Place

There is a new statue in the heart of Nottingham which, to my mind, gives a moving example of how that final question can be answered, anywhere in Britain.

Many years in the making, this bronze statue was created by artist Rachel Carter with the community history group Legacy Makers, commissioned by the National Justice Museum, also based in Nottingham, in the former Shire Hall and County Gaol. You can find full details at this website.

The statue portrays two women – an enslaved African woman of a cotton plantation and a white cotton mill worker – divided by ocean, heritage and horrors of slavery but united in heart and spirit, as we all can be today. It celebrates those who gain little attention in histories, if any at all. For myself, especially as a woman and a family historian exploring my own ancestral DNA connection to cousins of African heritage, this is the most positive and moving monument I’ve ever seen.

A Creole in Mickleover (reprise)

This is a revised (and longer) version of an article I posted last week – and which I rapidly took back down after checking the original entry I was so excited about… here now is the latest, positive news about the word Creole in Mickleover.

In recent weeks, I have been researching 16^th and 17^th century Pratts of Bretby and Repton (Derbyshire). One of them, the Rev. Henry Pratt, Rector of Cubley married an Ann Heiwood in Mickleover on 3 November 1639, so I searched the Mickleover All Saints PRs for Ann’s possible family.

Only to discover this baptism:

“Allice the daughter of a Creeole, born at Thomas Roome’s,
baptisd 6^th February 1635/6.”

The astonishment emoji was more than appropriate… surely this had to be an incredibly early documented usage of the term ‘creole’? Was it a description of a person of mixed African and French/Spanish/European heritage?

It is also of course an early example of the British historical tendency to use a probable ‘skin colour’ or geographical-origin term for a human being rather than their own actual name. It is therefore remarkable that the daughter of this human being was given a name Allice, though without a surname – once again typical practice by British owners of enslaved people.

After finding the entry, I dug around in online sources that looked helpful. Turns out that ‘creole’ as a term not only has centuries of history, its possible meanings are too numerous to count, as Wikipedia explains. Apparently, the word isn’t found often in documents until the late 17^th century, so 1635/6 really does seem early.

This is what the Oxford English Dictionary says:

“The earliest known use of the word Creole is in the late 1600s.
OED’s earliest evidence for Creole is from 1697, in the writing of William Dampier, buccaneer and explorer.”

Pause for thought and Checking the Original

On the brink of contacting the Oxford English Dictionary with an excited submission of an earlier date entry for the noun Creole, I realised that I had not actually checked the original Mickleover PRs. I was, without usual due caution, relying on a published transcription of those PRs by Llewellyn Lloyd Simpson (Parish Record Society, 1909).

I rushed to look at the register page on Ancestry.co.uk (Derbyshire England Church of England Baptisms, Marriages & Burials 1538-1812) and with horror saw that the entry in question was partially obscured by a dark blotch and the word ‘Creeole’ was very uncertain. Embarrassed by my rookie mistake, I took down the blogpost straight away and requested assistance from Derbys Record Office.

Archivist Becky Sheldon responded quickly and with interest. She checked the actual register and after careful consideration, supplied her opinion that the written word is ‘Creeole’, and she has updated the online catalogue with this detail.

A submission has now been made to the Oxford English Dictionary online.

Questions upon questions

Whether or not OED accept the entry in Mickleover PRs as a valid source for such early usage of the noun ‘Creole’, the fact of it raises all manner of questions…

Was the Creole mother single and alone at Thomas Roome’s or was she a married woman, perhaps with a husband also present, though unmentioned?

Was she perhaps a ‘sojourner’ or ‘foreigner’ (from elsewhere in Britain or abroad) only passing through Mickleover and taken in by Thomas Roome and his also pregnant wife when held up there by the birth of Allice?

Who was Thomas Roome and why would the daughter of a Creole be born in his house? He and other Mickleover Roomes were labourers and husbandmen, not usually in a position to have a servant, let alone a Creole one. If he had gone abroad himself and the Creole mother travelled to Mickleover with him, that would take dates back at least a further year or two, with some time spent in a foreign location and at least two ship journeys before 1635. We could speculate he was born in about 1610 or earlier?

Timeline indicators (from online sources including Wikipedia
plus insights from listers on the Derbysgen mailing list)

• In the 1560s, Sir John Hawkins (supported by Queen Elizabeth I) was the first known Briton to transport and trade in enslaved African people. He transported them to Hispaniola (now Dominican Republic & Haiti). This was the start of Britain’s soon-to-be leading role in the ‘Atlantic Triangular Trade’.
• In 1573, Francis Drake captured the Spanish Silver Train at Nombre de Dios (in Panama) and circumnavigated the world 1577-1580.
• The Honourable East India Company was founded on 31 Dec 1600, to trade with the ‘East Indies’.
• 1604-1609 British attempts at settlements in the ‘West Indies’ (French Guiana, St Lucia, Grenada) failed and their first permanent one came with the founding of St Christopher (or St Kitts) in the 1620s.
• In 1607, 104 men and boys arrived to establish the first permanent English settlement at Jamestown in Virginia, under the auspices of the Virginia Company of London. They had attracted participants by circulating pamphlets, plays, sermons and broadsides throughout England. In 1619, 20-30 Africans joined the colony after being captured from a Portuguese slave ship en route to Veracruz, Mexico. Historians suggest they had the status of indentured servants and not enslaved people as most were free by 1630 (see the fascinating history by Albert Broussard at BlackPast here.)
• In 1610, the Newfoundland Company (also known as the London & Bristol Company) was granted a Royal charter aiming to monopolise the North Atlantic fishery and make permanent settlements in Newfoundland (as well as the temporary summer ones for salting and shipping fish that the European and British fishers had been doing in large numbers for a century or so already). Sir Percy Willoughby of Wollaton Hall, Notts was a leading and long-term figure in this Company and he sent local men and boys to participate in this (never fully successful) venture.
• The religious Separatists (Brownists) known as Pilgrims set sail, with others, in the Mayflower fleet on 16 Sep 1620 and landed at Plymouth, Massachusetts on 21 Dec 1620. Many had lived in Scrooby, Notts (and nearby Gainsborough, Lincs) before flight to the Netherlands escaping persecution. They were followed by the ‘Great Migration’ of Puritans and others to New England, at its height in the 1630s. This included Dorothy Cotchet, sister of Capt Robert Cotchet at Mickleover. She married John Joyce in 1638 and migrated with him to New England where he had already been living before 1637.
• Settlement on Barbados began in 1627. On 26 November 1678 at BarbadosSt John: Thomas Sonne of Thomas Roome was baptised. (Source: Findmypast) But while this MIGHT suggest a Roome family connection with the Caribbean of earlier date, there is nothing to say this father and son were of Mickleover origin. It’s just another tantalising possibility.

In other words, there were numerous ways in which ‘foreigners’ turned up in England and for a middle-Englander to be involved in foreign travel or settlement in the late 16^th and early 17^th centuries, particularly to, in and from the Caribbean, Americas or East Indies.

Lords and gentry

Was the Creole mother perhaps a servant to one of the Lords or gentry of Mickleover or nearby, with adventurer and colonisation interests?

Lordship of Mickleover manor between the 1570s and 1640 was fluid: held by Sir William Reade whose daughter & heir married Sir Michael Stanhope, then by their three daughters as co-sharers of the manor. In 1640, Elizabeth Lady Berkeley sold her third share to sister Bridget wife of George Fielding, 1^st Earl of Desmond who sold those two shares in 1648 to Edward Wilmot.

The Stanhopes are not recorded with colonial interests until later dates. The Berkeleys, Fieldings and Wilmots have not been checked out.

The gentry of Mickleover (with Littleover and Findern) noted as ‘Mr’ and ‘Esq’ in either the 1670 Hearth Tax Assessment or the parish registers were:

• Mr John Hill
• Mr Robert Newton
• Hugh Ingram Esq (and Mrs Jane Ingram)
• Mrs Jane Houghton
• Capt Robert Cotchet & his heirs
• Mr John Curzon (patron of minister Samuel Charles instituted c1660)
• Richard Harper Esq – 10 hearths at Littleover
• Mr Huntingford
• Mr Pootey? (at Finderne)

All or any of these gents and ladies could have had investments in colonisation and/or ownership of enslaved African people – and this can be checked out – but Mr Richard Newton stands out, because Samuel Newton (son of Edward) of South Wingfield purchased land in Barbados in 1654 and employed enslaved Africans on the plantation he settled there. (Source: Centre for the Study of Legacies of British Slavery). An earlier Mr Richard Newton lived in Mickleover and died in 1619. A family connection is possible.

Roome questions continue

Extant parish registers for Mickleover start in 1607 and no record for a Thomas Roome appears until 1624 (a burial), followed by a marriage for Thomas Roome of Mickleover to Margerie Storer at Derby St Werburgh in 1625. They produce children in Mickleover from 1627 to 1637 with the baptism on 6 February 1635/6 of Allice, daughter of a Creole, born at Thomas Roome’s house, at practically the same time as Thomas & Margery’s next child John, baptised on 24 April 1636. The Thomas with Margery is the only known Thomas Roome in Mickleover in this period, so the dates suggest (but don’t prove of course) that he wasn’t Allice’s father. There could easily have been other Thomas Roomes around, especially single ones born before 1607, not noted in the parish register.

But if the Thomas Roome with Margery wasn’t the father of Allice, who was?

How did Thomas or the minister or the register keeper of a small middle-England village in 1635/6 know to use the term Creole?

And what did he/they mean by it? OED says that historically the term was used to mean white people of European origin – most often French or Spanish – who had spent time abroad (usually the Caribbean or the Americas) and returned to Europe, but that people of African or indigenous heritage mixed with European were most often termed ‘Creole’.

So was the mother a white British or European person who had returned from abroad, or was she a person of colour, of mixed white and African or indigenous heritage, or even perhaps wholly Black or Asian? And either way, how did she travel from abroad and how or why did she end up in Mickleover?

*****

This remarkable wee entry in Mickleover PRs leads into an area of research I’m just starting: the historical connections of British families to the slave trade and enslaved people – at home, in the Caribbean and in the colonies of North America. My interest is in ordinary people’s connections (the inhabitants of Mickleover in the 1630s being a probable example, in contact with a Creole person), not so much the wealthy merchants, ship owners and planters – although their records of course are likely to be the most important sources of information about less wealthy Britons, as well as enslaved people.

I would love to hear from anyone else with an interest in those kinds of historical connections and, in particular, with any insight into the story of a Creole person and her daughter in the heart of the English Midlands in the 1630s!

Who was George Cameron?

Make sure you are sitting comfily, and take some deep breaths… this part of my Scottish family is complicated – and takes a good few words to explain.

64 of my DNA matches at Ancestry connect with George Cameron, born in the 1850s in Glasgow. At least half of them have family trees that include George as a brickwall. All of them share matches with some or all of each other – and with me. So George’s parentage has been a mystery for a lot of people.

George made his life in Mississippi, USA and was commemorated at Findagrave: (https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/52669916/george-cameron) showing two wives and six children. Following their links shows that he brought about a very large dynasty.

So who was George?

Through analysis of DNA matches, I now think, with near certainty, that he was an out-of-wedlock son for my great-great-granny Cecilia Beaton or Beattie, who I have for a long time nicknamed Naughty Cecilia.

Who was Naughty Cecilia?

Cecilia was born “in fornication” (as the kindly parish clerk wrote it in the kirk register) on 15 April 1820 in Lennoxtown by Milton of Campsie, Stirlingshire, Scotland, baptised in Campsie Kirk seven weeks later on 4 June 1820. The fornicating parents were Alexander Beaton, labourer of Lennoxtown and Margaret Baird, aged about 17, daughter of coal miner Robert Baird.

Of course, we only have Margaret and the parish clerk’s word for it that Alexander Beaton really was the father. He appears to have done a runner and nothing more can be found for him afterwards. Not even DNA matching has shone any light, so I think it’s open to consideration he wasn’t Cecilia’s dad.

Lennoxtown and Campsie in the 1820s, at the start of industrialisation, were akin to the wild west, with coal mining and printfields (textile dying and print factories) drawing workers in from near and far.

Pollution of the river that powered the industries along with reeking chimneys and 24 hour noise must have been the everyday miasma for new arrivals looking for work, housing and love. There were high levels of drinking and ‘easy sex’ – not a lot else available as cheap entertainment. Inevitably, it was women who paid the highest price, in the form of unwanted pregnancies, absconding fathers and children beyond their means to support.

Records show that, from this tough start, Cecilia’s life stayed hard for good, though she survived to the age of 81. She must have been only 16 when she birthed her first child Janet in Kilmarnock in 1836, with ‘husband’ James Liddle, a handloom weaver. It was probably one of Scotland’s irregular marriages, unrecorded and frowned upon but considered valid. They had 3 more children in Glasgow, then James died young in 1846 – and Cecilia made her first parish relief application that year (mentioned in later records but no longer extant).

From then on, Cecilia moved back and forth between Glasgow and Campsie, bringing six more children into the world between 1849 and 1862 with uncertain fathers – including, by the look of it, a child named George Cameron.

No baptisms can be found for any of the ten children, no marriages, several more parish relief applications in Glasgow (full of fibs) made by Cecilia and three of her daughters, and just two birth certificates for her youngest daughters – with a big fat fib included about Cecilia’s non-existent marriage to last known ‘husband’ William Williamson. Living outwith respectability honed a keen ability to lie. All the evidence suggests that Cecilia, with multiple mouths to feed, supplemented meagre income from printfield work and parish doles by turning tricks – just as many other desperately poor women did at the time.

Working out the DNA evidence

Most of the DNA matches of mine who have George Cameron in their trees share matches [by ‘triangulation’] with me and other descendants of the family lines begat by Naughty Cecilia – the Liddles, Melvilles, Forrests, Williamsons, Inches and more – so many of them that it would be hard to argue George was NOT a descendant of Cecilia.

He must have emigrated to Mississippi, USA before 1871 when he married his first wife Christine Caroline “Carrie” Chatham there. He made his life in Simpson County and died there in 1901. All the family trees where he turns up give his estimated birth date as about 1851 to 1858.

There was a gap around that time between Cecilia’s son Thomas born in c1849 (unknown father but given her late husband’s surname of Liddle) and son Walter born c1856 (unknown father but Cecilia’s parish relief application of 1867 said the dad was James Duncan who had absconded). Therefore, I postulate that George was born in that gap, say 1852-3.

I also postulate that he was passed to others at birth or soon afterwards, to be brought up, unofficially adopted, taken into the newly established Glasgow Workhouse, or into an orphanage…  Records that might tell us his fate are thin on the ground but, in any event, he was given a different name to his mother and sibs and never appeared with them in any census or family record.

Another, even less attractive possibility, is that George was a child of one of Cecilia’s eldest daughters – Janet Liddle born in 1836 (therefore about 16-17 in 1852-3) or even Margaret Liddle born in 1840 or earlier (therefore possibly just old enough for a child in 1852-3). Both Janet and Margaret, and a younger sister Jane, did have out-of-wedlock children themselves. Janet’s son John born c1855 was ‘adopted’ into the family she had with husband William Melville (married 1857). Margaret’s daughter Frances born 29 January 1862 was found by police “exposed on a stair” in Glasgow, and the baby died at 11 months in December 1862. Soon after, Margaret emigrated to Queensland, Australia and married Joseph Banks there in 1865.

As we can see, all the available evidence points to desperate times for this poor family so there is no surprise in the idea that George Cameron was given up by whichever desperate woman or girl birthed him. But DNA doesn’t lie and it tells us that George did belong to one of them, most likely to Naughty Cecilia.

But who was the daddy?

Continuing analysis of autosomal DNA matches suggests very strongly that George Cameron’s biological father was Naughty Cecilia’s last ‘husband’ William Williamson, which also suggests a longer relationship between them than previously thought. What it doesn’t explain is why Cecilia chose to give George away to be brought up by others as a Cameron, most likely a Kenneth Cameron who was living in the same Glasgow tenement as Cecilia in the 1850s.

Cecilia & her children – a brief summary

Cecilia Beaton born 1820 in Lennoxtown, Campsie; died 1902 in Clydebank
1^st irregular marriage with James Liddle (c1814-1846)

• Daughter Janet Liddle (c1836-1875), married William Melville or Melvin 1857
• Daughter Margaret Liddle (1840-?), married Joseph Banks in Queensland 1865
• Son James Liddle (c1843-1912) married Mary Grant in Campsie 1863 (moved to Northumberland, England)
• Daughter Jane Liddle (c1845-?) married Hugh Brogan 1869 in Maryhill, Glasgow

With unknown fathers:

• Son Thomas Liddle (1849-?) emigrated to the USA
• Son George Cameron (c1852-1901) emigrated to Mississippi, USA

With reputed father James Duncan who absconded:

• Son Walter Liddle, later Williamson (c1856-1916) married Elizabeth Anderson in Campsie in 1878, moved to the Renton, Dumbartonshire

With ‘husband’ William Williamson who died in 1863 (and may not have fathered these children):

• Daughter Cecilia Williamson (1861-1919), my great-granny, married Robert Inch in the Renton 1878. They moved to Clydebank
• Daughter Mary Williamson (1861-1935) (probably fathered by a man named Forrest & married another one!). She married James Forrest in the Renton in 1881. They emigrated to Lynn, Massachusetts
• Son William Williamson (c1862-1903) married Janet Marshall Speirs in Row, Dumbartonshire in 1898 but sadly died a few years later in Larbert Asylum.

Liminal lands

There’s a wonderment to searching the glorious landscapes of Strathearn in Scotland for the ancestors who for 67 of my 71 years I didn’t know I had. Even more wondrous to know, with a twist of English irony and amusement, these are the clanlands of my ain blood kin – the McLarens of Balquhidder and thereabouts, with Sinclairs, Morisons, Anguses, Grays, McDonalds and McNabs too.

In the 18^th century, these folk made a hard living on the land and as weavers and spinners, soldiers, cattle drovers, servants and tradesmen: tenants mostly of Drummonds (Dukes of Perth) who ‘stole’ the McLaren land (in truth, the McLarens contrived to lose it for themselves three centuries earlier, a version of forgetting to renew their subscription). My particular branch lived a short way from Balquhidder, mainly in Crieff, Muthill [Moo-thill], and their surrounding farms and settlements: Bennybeg, Struthill, Ballah, Drumness, Machany, Broich and more. Romantic names from the Gaelic.

Muthill & the Highlands beyond

I’ll confess a love of the ‘liminal’ – that interesting place where a line divides two things. The line may be blurry or definite, hard or soft, real or imaginary, but that division always affects both sides. Learning the history of the Crieff-Muthill area, I’ve found the very definition of liminal.

Highland vs Lowland = Gaelic vs English

The line of difference between Scotland’s Highlands and Lowlands runs diagonally along the Highland Boundary Fault, south-west to north-east, straight through Strathearn and close to the north of Crieff and Broich House – the family home of former MP Rory Stewart, his father and grandfather. In his book The Marches – a Borderland journey between England and Scotland, Rory vividly describes the difference the Fault made:

“Contemporary historians question whether the different soils [either side of the Fault] had always coincided with a recognised border between two different economic systems, social structures and languages. It was certainly, true, however, that by the 16^th century the Highland side wore tartan plaids around their waist and shoulders, had bagpipes and lived in clan structures – and the Lowland side did none of these things. In fact they dressed and lived in a culture not very different from that of northern England.

As late as 1800 everyone on the flat land around our house in Crieff spoke English. But two miles away, behind the first hill in Monzie, or in Comrie, almost everyone spoke Gaelic.”

Clan hostilities

And when we learn the history of clans in the Highlands, there’s no escaping the centuries long antagonisms, fights and even massacres between them. It was a warrior society of fiercely held loyalties to clan chiefs. On the Highland side, tensions persisted between Balquhidder McLarens and the Drummonds who now held their traditional lands and even more viciously between McLarens and McGregors (including Rob Roy). But my own McLaren families and their married-ins, a short distance away on the Lowland side, were visibly unengaged with their clans, apparently English-speaking… different.

Episcopal and Presbyterian

Very broadly speaking (with apologies to those who know far more about this than I do), the Reformation in Scotland changed the church from Roman Catholic to Episcopal (the Reformed Church of Scotland until 1688), losing the Pope’s authority but retaining Bishops, while the majority of Scots became Presbyterian. By the time of my brickwall McLaren, Sinclair and Angus ancestors, there were still three main religious adherences: Catholicism in the Highlands, Episcopalians on both sides of the Fault with Presbyterians everywhere but especially in the Lowlands. Drummonds, the local landlords of the Crieff-Muthill area were Episcopalian and supporters of the Stuart monarchs.

Now lets see how that played out in Muthill, as described in The Transcript of the Register of Baptisms, Muthill, Perthshire from AD 1697-1847:-

The Muthill Church Registers hold a position distinct from the ordinary parish books: they belonged to the Episcopalian congregation which has existed in Muthill ever since the Revolution of 1688 and the consequent disestablishment of the Episcopal Church. For many years after their commencement they appear, however, to have been the most used if not the only register in the parish…

In 1689 James Inglis [Episcopalian] was presented by the patron the Earl of Perth [Drummond] and was deprived in 1693 for not praying for the reigning sovereigns William & Mary [Protestant]. He remained in the parish as minister of the Episcopalian congregation till his death, October 24, 1732. Though deprived in 1693, his successor Mr Wm Chalmers [Presbyterian] was not appointed till 1702 [and left the following year].

[Next came] William Haly, called by the Presbytery, after the parishioners refused to do so and ordained in the churchyard [on 3 Aug 1704], the church being retained by the intruder [the Rev James Inglis]. So great was the opposition to the Presbytery at Haly’s settlement that the populace armed with swords and staves occupied the churchyard, guarded the doors of the church, and refused admission either to him, or his co-presbyters, who were assailed with stones, even in that sacred place.

The matter did end more happily as Rev Haly was seemingly a skilled peacemaker, gaining acceptance of both sides. The Register for the church, however, remains a testament to the hostile history, with long gaps and 18^th century details of marriages, births and baptisms later noted down almost entirely from the local parishioners’ memories.

All the above divisions lead us inevitably to the ’45…

Jacobite Uprisings – and the aftermath for Perth estate

Jacobite means ‘supporter of James’, ie. the exiled James II and VII and also his son James III and VIII and grandson Charles Edward aka Bonnie Prince Charlie. The English think of the Jacobites largely in terms of just two uprisings, in 1715 and 1745. These were the clashes of Stuart-supporting, Gaelic speaking, clan-affiliated Highlanders, allied with French and Spanish, against the English forces under William & Mary, Queen Ann and Georges I and II. It was a time when the overwhelming majority of Scots were Protestant and four Scottish units were part of the Hanoverian army in 1745.

In truth there had been a continuing sequence of revolts from 1689 with the departure of Catholic James II and VII into exile and the arrival (some would say coup) of Dutch William IV and wife Mary (daughter of James II), both Protestant. There were major outbreaks in Scotland in 1708, 1715 and 1719, and the 1745/6 revolt is considered the final attempt, after the battles of Culloden and Falkirk, to restore Stuart monarchy (largely because the French didn’t invade England as had been planned).

In Strathearn, Drummond Duke of Perth and the McLarens in their ancient alliance with Stewarts of Appin were among the numerous clans in 1745 who rose to the call of Bonnie Prince Charlie to fight for a Stuart Restoration. In the aftermath, following the Duke of Cumberland’s infamous brutality against the Scots in general, Drummonds forfeited all their estates. These were then in the hands first of the Scottish Barons of Exchequer and from 1752 administered by Crown Commissioners, implementing the British English (Hanoverian) action plan for Scottish ‘settlement and improvement’, especially of the Highlands – fully colonialist in nature, imposing Protestantism on Catholics and Episcopalians alike [Muthill was a rare survival]. Drummonds were granted back their estate in 1785.

Evidence so far suggests that, despite their numbers and ancestral surname, McLarens of the southern (lowland) part of Strathearn were probably Presbyterian, English or Scots-speaking and did not follow the Highland clan into the rebellion.

And so…

Always, in genealogy and local history research, ‘liminal’ territory brings with it the need to absorb and understand the vying forces and to check all manner of differing sources, especially because those of the ‘underdog’ sides are prone to disappear or hide or simply not exist at all. As a newbie to Scottish history, this feels engaging and exciting – so far. Time will tell if that lasts, as the challenges of taking my Strathearn family lines back further than the ’45 mount up.

Newport Pagnell

I suspect there will be some among you, my followers and accidental readers, who will frown and wonder “Newport Pagnell?” Then there are the oldies like me who grew up near north London (nawf Land’n in local speak) who recall that the first ever Motorway (freeway) service station was at Newport Pagnell on the north-bound M1[1]. It even beat the Watford Gap service station to be first open, long regarded as the boundary between ‘the north’ (of England) and the south![2]

For years, whenever I was asked where I was from (Stony Stratford) and no-one had heard of it, I’d say “near Newport Pagnell” and their eyes would light up – “oh yes, I’ve seen it on M1 signposts!”. It is, of course, a noticable name, like so many English quaint-sounding places (Barton in the Beans, Michel Delving, Curry Mallet, Giggleswick, Little Snoring… see here for more).

But Newport Pagnell is dear to me in memory. About six easy cycling or bus-riding miles from home in Stony Stratford (north Buckinghamshire). It had the only swimming pool in the area where I spent childhood summers in inflatable ring or armbands failing to learn to swim[3]. Friends I knew at secondary school in Wolverton commuted from Newport, on a steam train known as ‘Nobby Newport’ until Beeching closed down the line.

OK, you may be thinking that’s very sweet but what’s the segue with ancestors?

First of all, there were some of my long-researched Starbucks in Newport in modern times (info courtesy of an old schoolfriend now back in touch). Secondly, some of my mother’s Bonham relatives were there. Thirdly, one of the weirdest bits of synchronicity I’ve known, the husband of my Pennsylvania research friend and colleague of many years, descends from a migrant ancestor named ‘Mylls alias Kendall’ of Newport Pagnell (and nearby Sherington).

A young man of that ilk emigrated to New England, among the first settlers of Woburn, Massachusetts and was recorded there in 1640, though he may have arrived earlier. On the occasion of his marriage, he gave his name as Francis Kendall alias Miles, and that fact launches a genealogical arrow directly from Woburn MA across the pond to Newport Pagnell and Sherington – because that alias name is unique and only a few people in north Buckinghamshire (with an offshoot in Enfield, Essex and of course Woburn MA) ever used it, though they used it for a long time between at least 1605 and 1759.

For the full low-down on this breakthrough in Woburn Francis research, see my friend Keri-Lynn Kendall’s blog https://ancestorquests.com/category/kendall/.

Then, to top even that, my ‘Scotch Chapmen’ settled in Newport Pagnell in the 17^th century through the 20^th, rather a lot of them in fact, as I previously reported here on my blog in its early days: Not Only Fools & Horses – ‘Scotch Chapmen’ in England 1660-1800, part 1, part 2 and part 3.

Now that I live in Scotland, I have at last an opportunity to track down their origins, mainly in the Scottish south-west district of Dumfries and Galloway. For anyone with family interests there, these are just some of the names of the migrant lace merchants and travelling dealers who settled permanently in Buckinghamshire and nearby lace counties:

ARMSTRONG, ARTHUR, ATCHISON, BEATY, BELL, BLACKLOCK, BRYAN, BRYDEN, BUCHANAN, CARLILE, CORRIE, CRICHTON, CROSBY, CUNNINGHAM, DICKSON, DYMOKE, EWER, FROWD/FROUD, GLASS, GOWAN/McGOWAN, GRIERSON, HAMILTON, HANNEY/HANNAH, HARKNESS, HOLIDAY, IRVING, JARDINE, JOHNSTONE, LATIMER, LITTLE, MACDOWELL, MAXWELL, MILLAGAN, MILLAR, PASLEY, PATTERSON, PERRY, PRESLEY, RENNY, ROUTLEDGE, ROY, STEELE, WAUGH and WELCH.

They chose Newport Pagnell in particular because in the 17^th century it was the heart of the English pillow-lacemaking industry (also home to rather a lot of religious dissent). Money to be made there for canny, non-Anglican Scots, as well as in London, which was just 50 miles south (though without a motorway to speed their journeys to and from). They were certainly Not Only Fools and Horses.[4]

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[1] It was even a gathering-place for mods and ace faces on their scooters in the 60s, so glamorous did the place feel when brand new.

[2] Local axiom: ‘Everything north of the Watford Gap is The North to Londoners’. Motorway signage declaring “The North” ahead only boosted that idea.

[3] I finally learned to swim when a new pool was opened next to the secondary school, and I got LESSONS. Took a matter of seconds, like learning to ride a bike: confidence or balance, all that’s needed.

[4] Title of a beloved British TV series, referring to a Cockney (east end of London) phrase ‘Only fools and horses work’, the philosophical outlook of stereotype Cockney dodgy geezers (like the show’s star Delboy Trotter) always on the alert for ways to make loadsa dosh without working. I’m saying here that the ex-pat Scots in Newport Pagnell were of course nothing like that.

The meaning of Starbuck

For seven years, in two spurts – 2016-17 and now, 2020-23 – I’ve hunted for documentary evidence of Edward Starbuck’s origins. He was the first of that name to arrive in New England and later, famously, in Nantucket. Accumulated circumstantial finds, however, make it certain that his Starbuck tribe was rooted in the ancient soil of south-east Derbyshire and south-west Nottinghamshire, most likely in Long Eaton and Toton, tiny settlements under the Danelaw on either side of the river Erewash, today’s county border.

Catchment area of the River Trent

One of the most well-known commercial brands today has always been a rare  surname in England. Only a handful of Starbuck families existed at any one time in the 16^th and 17^th centuries, all of them in or from that watery landscape where rivers Derwent, Trent and Erewash meet. We call it ‘Starbucky Territory’.

Starbuck variants

Back then, the name had regular variants: with or without a final ‘e’, with any of the five vowels after ‘St’, or between ‘b’ and ‘c’. Sometimes ending in ‘c’ without the ‘k’ and vice versa. A double or single ‘r’. And most intriguingly, it was sometimes written as two parts: Star Buck. Or Starr Bucke.

DNA testing proves that some English people named Buck are matched to Nantucket Starbuck descendants. The name Starr occurs in one or two parishes alongside Starbuck, so the names Buck and Starr have to be considered too.

Whatever the spelling or variant, however, the name’s etymology is uncertain. The only theory found online suggests an origin from the hamlet of Starbeck in north Yorkshire, between Ripon and Knaresborough. The earliest known version of the name is claimed to be Robert Starbok in 1379 Yorkshire Poll Tax returns, but I have also found a Thomas Starbok, tailor in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk in Close Rolls of 1384 (Hathi Trust). Since only a few Starbucks can be found in Yorkshire before the modern period, and occurrences of the name as Starbeck are vanishingly rare, these theories do not feel strong.

Viking origin?

A Y-DNA project in (2012-15) of Prof Turi King and colleagues suggested that Starbuck is a Viking type surname, potentially corroborated by the Y-DNA of tested participants named Starbuck. Long Eaton, Toton and most of ‘Starbucky Territory’ lay within the Danelaw, a region of Anglo-Saxon England colonised by Danish armies, ruled under Danish law from the late 9^th century until 1066.

Reading a modern transcripton of the 1086 ‘Domesday Book’ – the nationwide tax assessment ordered by William I – shows that Long Eaton’s population at that time included 22 ‘sokemen’ and its location within Sawley Manor was always termed in historical documents: ‘Sawley Manor and Soke’. The area of that ‘Soke’ was almost entirely in Long Eaton. Next-door Toton had 4 ‘sokemen’.

It is unsurprising that a tax assessment conducted just two decades after the Conquest noted the presence of landholders who themselves, or their forebears, were almost certainly Danish – the ‘sokemen’ who were freer than freemen and freeholders in feudal terms. They held their ‘sokeland’ freely, able to buy and sell, come and go, without a Lord’s permission. The 1086 Domesday Book shows sokes, sokelands and sokemen in many settlements of ‘Starbucky Territory’, though Long Eaton with 22 appears to have had the largest number in that area.

A fresh etymology suggestion

The Domesday Book notes that Long Eaton’s neighbouring settlement of Breaston was held before the Conquest by Leofnoth Sterre, a significant landholder of 29 manors in Derbyshire and Leicestershire, who lost everything to the Normans.

Leofnoth is an Anglo-Saxon name, ‘Leof’ meaning ‘loved’ or ‘friendly’ and ‘noth’ meaning ‘strength’. ‘Sterre’ is a Saxon as well as Viking/Danish nickname, translated as ‘Star’ in modern English. Another etymology suggests that as a Viking nickname it could mean ‘leader’. For such a prominent landholder, a nickname of ‘leader’ would be appropriate.

The coincidence of a Danish nickname of ‘Star’ so close to where Starbucks originated is enticing. If we add a possible meaning of the ‘buck’ part of their name, we find that while related to the sense of male goat or deer, it was also a term for ‘man’ (Old Norse ‘bokki’), especially a ‘fashionable man’.

Surname history shows that heritable surnames began to develop from the 11^th century in England so maybe it’s not too much of a stretch to think that someone known as Leader’s Man (‘Sterre Buck’), farming perhaps in Breaston or Long Eaton in the early 11^th century led to the establishment of the Starbuck surname.