When was the last time Europe lacked a female ruler?

Queen Margrethe II of Denmark, who abdicated the throne on 14 January 2024.

I am slightly digressing from my usual focus on genealogy and family history to discuss another of my favourite topics: royal history. And if you like quizzes and riddles, please stay put!

I want to discuss what yesterday started off as a riddle between me and my father (whose love of history I have inherited). The question is very simple: when was the last time that European monarchs were all men? Or to put it a different way: on which date did Europe lack a female ruler?

The question arose following the unexpected abdication of Denmark’s Queen Margrethe II, which was announced during her New Year’s Eve address on 31 December 2023 and came into force yesterday, 14 January 2024. This means that today, 15 January 2024, all ten incumbent European hereditary monarchies – Belgium, Denmark, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Monaco, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom – are headed by men (I am not counting the Principality of Andorra nor the Vatican, as neither is a hereditary monarchy).

Of course, the situation is set to be only temporary. Four of those men (King Philippe of the Belgians, King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands, King Felipe of Spain and King Carl XVI Gustav of Sweden) are all due to be succeeded one day by a woman, and two further women (Princess Ingrid-Alexandra of Norway and Princess Estelle of Sweden) are expected to inherit the throne in the next generation, as second-in-line.

While trying to work out the last date on which Europe lacked any ruling female monarchs whatsoever (not necessarily queens – empresses or sovereign grand duchesses would also count, of course), I found myself going back decades and even centuries, until I found what I think is the correct answer. As always, I am happy to be proven wrong!

If we go back in history, here is the unbroken chain of female monarchs whose reigns overlapped with each other.

• Queen Margrethe II of Denmark (b.1940), who came to the throne in January 1972, has been the sole European female monarch since September 2022, when Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II passed away at the age of 96.
• Queen Elizabeth II (1926-2022) ascended the British throne in 1952 following the sudden death of her father, King George VI. Yet there was already another female monarch in Europe at the time right across the English Chanel.
• Queen Juliana of the Netherlands (1909-2004) inherited the throne in 1948 following the abdication of her mother, Queen Wilhelmina (1880-1962). She, in turn, became queen in 1890 after the death of her father.
  

Queen Juliana of the Netherlands reigned between 1948 and 1980. She inherited the Dutch throne from her mother, and eventually passed it on to her daughter.

• By 1890, Britain had been ruled by a woman for over forty years: Queen Victoria (1819-1901) was, until recently, Britain’s longest-reigning monarch and remains one of the country’s most emblematic female monarchs, giving her name to an entire era.
• When Queen Victoria came to throne in 1837, after the death of her uncle King William IV, there were at least three female monarchs in Europe: Queen Isabella II of Spain (who reigned between 1833 and 1868), Queen Maria II of Portugal (who reigned between 1834 and her death in 1853) and Napoleon Bonaparte’s widow, Marie Louise of Austria (1791-1847), who was sovereign Duchess of Parma, Piacenza and Guastalla in her own right from 1814 until her death in 1847.
• Marie Louise’s predecessor on this list of European sovereigns was Portugal’s Queen Maria I (1734-1816), who was queen from 1777 to 1816 – admittedly she had been declared insane by the latter part of her reign and was living in exile in Brazil.
• By the time Queen Maria ascended the throne in 1777, Austria was ruled by the famous Empress Maria Theresa (1717-1780). She had been ruler of the Habsburg dominions from 1740 until her death in 1780. Her reign as Queen of Bohemia and Queen of Hungary began on 20 October 1740, and for a moment I thought we had found the answer to the riddle.

Empress Anna of Russia was head of the Russian state between 1730 and 1740. She began an unbroken chain of European female rulers that ended on 14 January 2024!

• Enter Empress Anna of Russia (1693-1740), who ascended the throne in 1730 and died shortly after Empress Maria Theresa inherited her dominions. The overlap between the two women’s reigns is extremely short – a mere eight days, safeguarded by the fact that Empress Anna died on 17 October 1740 according to the Julian calendar which was in use in Russia at the time – and which translated into 28 October 1740 according to the Gregorian calendar, which was used in most of Europe, including Austria, at the time.
• To the best of my knowledge, when Anna inherited the throne on 15/26 February 1730 following the death of her predecessor Peter II on 19/30 January, there were no women ruling in Europe in their own right.
• I can only deduce, therefore, that the last time that Europe had no women sovereigns was 25 February 1730 – the day before Anna’s accession. That’s an astonishing 294-year period!

Of course, there have been many female rulers in Europe since time immemorial – think of Eleanor of Aquitaine, Queen Isabella of Castile, Queen Joan of Naples, or the Tudor queens Mary and Elizabeth. But the unbroken line above demonstrates that, despite changes in succession laws in recent times, European monarchies remain very much a male-dominated world.

While most surviving European monarchies will have a female monarch before long, the laws that regulate the royal succession still given men precedence over women in Monaco and Spain. Liechtenstein is the only European monarchy that strictly applies “Salic law” or agnatic primogeniture, which effectively excludes women from the line of succession.

Most European monarchies apply absolute primogeniture; two still apply male primogeniture; and one applies agnatic primogeniture.

The mystery of Samuel Morris’s origins

Morris was my great-grandmother’s maiden name, so when I was growing up, I was well aware of its existence in my recent family history. However, when I later became interested in genealogy, I soon discovered how difficult it was going to be to track down the origins of the Morris family tree.

The earliest ancestor I was able to trace without much difficulty was my four-times great-grandfather Samuel Morris. Born towards the end of the 18th century, he died in Almeley (Herefordshire) in 1867 having survived his wife Ann and the youngest of their three children; his only surviving children were his daughter Mary (who married Thomas Seaborne in 1853) and my three-times great-grandfather, who was called Samuel Cartwright Morris.

Samuel Morris (bottom line), described as the father of the head of the family. His son Samuel Cartwright Morris and the latter’s growing family are listed as well. Samue’s place of birth is given as Hereford St Peter’s.

Given that he died in 1867, Samuel Sr. is recorded in three 19th-century census records (1841, 1851 and 1861). In the last of these he was already a widower and lived with his son Samuel and the latter’s family in Kinnersley, not far from Almeley. Ten years before, in the 1851 census, Samuel was already living in Kinnersley, but in the company of his wife Ann, their eldest and as yet unmarried daughter Mary, and their baby granddaughter Catherine (their son Samuel’s eldest child). Ten years before, in 1841, Samuel was living with his wife in her native hometown of Kington, together with their two youngest children Samuel and Charlotte.

Samuel Morris’s entry on the 1851 census – stating his place of birth as Hereford All Saints. Living under the same roof are his wife Ann, their daughter Mary and their granddaughter Catherine.

The ages given on all three census records, plus Samuel’s age at death in 1867, all suggest a birth year somewhere between 1788 and 1792. Although apparently born in the city of Hereford, there is some inconsistency as to the parish in which Samuel had been born: according to the 1851 census he was born in the parish of All Saints, while in 1861 he was noted as having been born in the parish of St. Peter.

The main issue arises from the fact that there are two infants called Samuel Morris who were baptised in the city of Hereford around the same time: one, baptised on 16 May 1785 in Hereford All Saints, was the son of Samuel and Elizabeth Morris; the other, baptised on 30 October 1796 (but born on 19 August 1794) was the son of Samuel and Catherine Morris. The first candidate’s parents were probably Samuel Morris and Elizabeth Gritton, who were married in Madley in 1775, while the parents of the second one were almost certainly Samuel Morris and Catherine Carpenter, who were married in 1791. The big question now is: how can I be sure which one of the two boys was my ancestor?

The 1796 baptism in Hereford St Peter’s of Samuel Morris, son of Samuel and Catherine Morris. Observe the year of birth is 1794.

There is, unfortunately, very little to go on that would allow me to say with any degree of certainty which one of the two is my ancestor. If I had to hazard a guess, I would say it’s probably the one born in 1794 and baptised in 1796. There are mainly two reasons for this: firstly, a Samuel Morris was buried in the parish of All Saints in 1793, which could be indicative that the child born to Samuel and Elizabeth Morris in 1785 passed away at a young age; sadly, the burial record itself only states the deceased’s name, without noting where he lived or if he happened to be someone’s child – and most other child burials in the parish do seem to indicate as much. Therefore, this entry is, at best, inconclusive.

The burial record for Hereford All Saints in 1793 that mentions Samuel Morris (fifth entry on the left). Observe how, unlike other cases on the page, there is no reference to him being a child or the son of a specific couple.

The second reason for my supposing that my Samuel Morris was born to Samuel and Catherine Morris in 1794 is the fact that Catherine is a name found in the family tree – it was the name given to Samuel’s eldest granddaughter, who happened to be living with him in the 1851 census. Alas, this could well be nothing more than an almighty coincidence.

Unfortunately, intuition in genealogy is not enough to prove or disprove a theory. I need tangible evidence in order to conclude who really were the parents of my ancestor Samuel Morris. In effect, neither of my reasons for believing that the boy born in 1794 to Samuel and Catherine Morris is sufficiently watertight to reach a final conclusion. I will have to keep digging until further evidence surfaces to prove me right – or wrong…

Do you have any suggestions as to how I can take my research further? Do you think there is a strong possibility that either one of the two boys was my ancestor? If you have any ideas or have spotted any flaws in my research, please leave a comment below.

What happened to Joseph William Rodway?

Casltemorton, Worcestershire, where the Rodways lived for two generations before moving to the London East End. Image source: Wikimedia Commons

The Rodways of Castlemorton

In 1853 my great-great-great-great-uncle John Rodway, a wheelwright by profession, died in the Worcestershire village of Castlemorton, where he had lived for most of his adult life. He was 60 years of age, a widower, and had recently experienced the loss of his fourth child, Thomas, who had passed away aged only 28. Sadly, within a year of John’s death, two of his three other surviving children would also go to an early grave – thus leaving his middle son, William Rodway, as the sole surviving member of the entire family.

Born in 1820, William Rodway would go on to become a greengrocer by trade; his first marriage to Harriot Hooper ended abruptly in 1849 with the passing of his wife, thus leaving him to raise their two small children, Joseph William and Angelina. William subsequently met Mary Ann Clee – I have no proof that they ever married – by whom he would have a further seven children. However, by the time their youngest was born, the family had moved away from the rural Worcestershire countryside and settled in the bustling East End of London. It was also there that William’s eldest son, Joseph William, would spend the remainder of his life.

Joseph William Rodway

Like his father and many of his relatives before him, Joseph William Rodway had been born in Castlemorton. The loss of his mother in 1849, when he was only four years old, must have made a devastating impression on the young boy. Fortunately, relatives were at hand: on the 1851 census he was listed living with his maternal grandparents, who also lived in Castlemorton. However, by the time the 1861 census was taken, he had left Worcestershire for the overcrowded streets of London. He continued to live with his father and the latter’s growing family for several years, and it was probably through his father’s training and influence that Joseph William also became a greengrocer.

In 1866 Joseph William married Catherine Ruthe, an East End engineer’s daughter who had grown up to the sound of Bow bells. The wedding took place in Stepney’s Trinity Church, which no longer exists as it was unfortunately destroyed during the Blitz. The couple initially set up house at 3 Burdett Road, Mile End Old Town, where they began a family of their own: Joseph William Jr (1869) and Catherine, known as Kate (1870), were both recorded on the 1871 census with their parents, as would be Florence (1872), Albert (1878) and Maurice (1880) ten years later. The couple’s last child, Jessie, would be born in late 1882, while another daughter called Adeline Elizabeth passed away in 1877 aged two.

If census records are anything to go by, there is nothing seemingly remarkable about the Rodways during the next few years, besides the fact that they changed address from time to time: in 1881 they were living at 59 Haggerstone Road, St Leonard’s Shoreditch, while ten years later they were recorded living at 312 Devons Road, Bromley-by-Bow. I can imagine that a greengrocer’s income would be insufficient to keep the family far above the poverty line, though thus far they seemed to have successfully avoided the dreaded workhouse.

A mysterious death?

And yet, not everything appears to have been well in the Rodway household, for 1891 would be the last census in which Joseph William would be recorded living with his wife and children. When his second daughter Florence married in 1894, her father was recorded as “dec[eased]” on the marriage certificate. On the other hand, while the marriage certificate of his elder daughter Kate in 1896 does not say as much, the 1901 census clearly states that his wife Catherine – by then living back in Mile End Old Town with her children Joseph William, Maurice and Jessie – was a widow. All these facts would therefore suggest that Joseph William had died sometime between 1891 and 1901, when the respective decennial censuses were taken, and more probably before 1894, when his daughter Florence got married. And yet, despite trying various spelling alternatives, there is not a single trace of a burial nor an entry of death that fits the fill, either on FreeBMD or on the GRO index, nor on any of the major genealogical websites. What happened to Joseph William Rodway?

Florence Rodway’s 1894 marriage certificate clearly states her father Joseph [William] Rodway was deceased.

Almost by chance, I came across an entry of death, registered in Shoreditch in 1883, for a 35-year-old man called Joseph Rodway. Except for the absence of a middle name, the place, age and name all matched with the information I had about my relative – were it not or the fact that in 1891 he was supposedly still alive! But we must remember that Joseph William and Catherine’s last child had been born in Shoreditch in 1882, and Joseph William himself declared he was in his mid-30s when the 1881 census was taken. I began to wonder: could he have truly died in 1883 and been recorded on the 1891 census by mistake, perhaps by a grieving widow who thought she had to declare who her husband had been? Did the census enumerator make a mistake? Believing there was a good chance that this may have been my distant cousin, I decided to order a digital copy of the 1883 death certificate from the GRO website, and dispel the mystery once and for all.

Unfortunately, my imagination had got the better of me. The Joseph Rodway who died in Shoreditch in late 1883 was a “fancy case maker”, not a greengrocer, as my Joseph William Rodway had been consistently recorded on all census records. He lived on Canal Road (not an address, as far as I know, associated in any way with my relatives), and had been admitted into the Shoreditch Infirmary, where he eventually died. This led me to conclude that I had the death record for the wrong man – but more importantly, it left one key question unanswered: what happened to Joseph William Rodway after 1891?

A broken-down marriage

I briefly considered the possibility that Joseph William may have abandoned his family and emigrated, as so many people did back then… but I did not have to go far to discover that he needn’t have boarded a steamer to elude my research efforts. There it was, hiding almost in plain sight: a 1901 census entry for Joseph William Rodway, a married 54 year-old greengrocer from Worcestershire, living by himself at 158 Boleyn Road, Stoke Newington, Hackney. This could not be a simple coincidence – this had to be my Joseph William Rodway! But before jumping to conclusions again, I had to ask myself the question: could there have been a second Joseph William Rodway from Worcestershire, born around the same period, who worked as a greengrocer in London at the same time as my relative? A quick check for a birth in Worcestershire for a possible second Joseph William Rodway brought up only one single candidate – my distant relative himself. This could only mean that the Joseph William Rodway living in Stoke Newington in 1901 was indeed my distant cousin!

It was obvious by this stage that Joseph William and his wife Catherine had parted ways at some point during the 1880s – whether the separation was mutually agreed to, or he led his family to believe that he was dead, I could not say. Perhaps the fact that Florence’s entry of marriage as the daughter of a man who was supposedly dead, and Catherine’s own declaration on the 1901 census that she was a widow, may well have been an effort to conceal the fact that the marriage had broken down irreparably, and Joseph William had consequently agreed to move out of the family home. In addition, the fact that all of his children remained close to their mother – and to each other, since they witnessed each other’s marriages as they found partners of their own – suggests to me that they all sided with Catherine following the separation. It is impossible to even guess what the reason for the separation was.

At some point between 1901 and 1903, Catherine and Joseph William’s youngest son, Maurice – then a young man of 23 – was admitted into the Mile End Old Town workhouse on Bancroft Road. He was eventually released on 21 April 1903, only to be sent to Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum in Barnet. The Asylum had only recently been partially devastated by a fire which had claimed the lives of over 50 female inmates. Remains of the distressing event must have been evident by the time Maurice arrived there 120 years ago. Alas, it was to remain his permanent residence for the remainder of his life: he died there of pulmonary and intestinal tuberculosis in February 1915.

Colney Hatch Asylum, where Maurice Rodway spent the last 12 years of his life.

1911 would be the last time that Joseph William Rodway would be recorded on a national census. At the time, he was living at 173 Garratt Lane, Wandsworth. Living with my 65-year-old relative were a servant (a widow called Kate Taylor, of Monmouth) and two boarders (Henry and Emma Carter, of Chelsea). Despite his advanced years and personal circumstances – or perhaps because of them – Joseph William was still working as a greengrocer. Things likely took a turn for the worse shortly thereafter, and by late July he was taken to the recently-opened St James Infirmary, in Balham, where he finally succumbed to mitral valve disease. Touchingly, his estranged wife Catherine was present, and it was she who registered the death the same day of his passing in the local registry office. It seems that by the end at least, Joseph William and Catherine and made peace with each other.

A tragic epilogue

The final, tragic chapter of the family’s story took place three decades later, at the height of the Blitz. Joseph William and Catherine’s eldest son (confusingly also called Joseph William) had gone into the greengrocery business like his father and grandfather before him. His marriage to Ida Ethel Clapp had lasted almost forty years, but the couple remained childless.

By 1939, Joseph William Jr had gone blind, forcing him into early retirement. According to a later statement by his wife, he began to act “childishly” – perhaps a sign that he was suffering from mental illness, possibly brought on by syphilis (which is known to cause blindness, impotence and eventually dementia). Be it as it may, Ida Ethel Rodway had to give up her own job in a local shoe factory to nurse her husband. Then, with the onset of war, their home on 11 Martello Road was bombed and badly damaged. Fortunately the couple survived with only superficial injuries, and after a brief spell in hospital, went to stay with Ida Ethel’s sister at 39 Kingshold Road in Hackney. The sudden change of environment was very trying for Joseph William Jr, who became restless in his new surroundings. Ida Ethel also became concerned about their limited income (Joseph William’s old age pension was coming to an end, it seems), and was worried that their old home would have to be pulled down entirely.

As usual, on the morning of 1 October 1940 Ida Ethel made tea for her husband, but just as her sister left for work, she picked up an axe and a kitchen knife, and went to the room upstairs where her husband was resting. Distressed at their pitiful situation, and in a desperate effort to put an end to his miserable existence, she bludgeoned Joseph William Jr on the neck, killing him almost instantly. Offering no resistance, Ida Ethel was arrested and later tried for her husband’s murder, but was spared the death penalty when she was declared insane and unfit to plead. She died at Broadmoor Asylum in 1946, a year after the end of the war.

Joseph William Rodway Jr’s life was cut short due to the effects of the Blitz in 1940.

Elizabeth Howard (née Norgrove?, 1684-aft.1763)

Pembridge church, Herefordshire. Photo courtesy of the National Churches Trust.

My 6x great-grandmother, Sarah Howard, was born in the second half of 1723, being baptised in the Herefordshire village of Pembridge on 11 October that same year. Her parents were William and Elizabeth Howard.

Sarah had at least two elder siblings: Eleanor (b.1718) and Thomas (b.1720). Lack of further references to Thomas would suggest that he probably died young; he is certainly not mentioned in his father’s will, written in February 1763. Sarah also had two younger sisters, Alice and Anne, who were most likely twins as they were both baptised on 21 July 1726; again, neither of them are mentioned in William Howard’s will, which suggests they too died young (as was often the case with multiple births at the time).

Sarah therefore likely grew up as the younger of two siblings, effectively only having an elder sister, Eleanor. However, their father’s aforementioned will makes a passing reference to an additional family member whose existence may have given me a clue as to the origins of William’s wife (and Sarah’s mother), my 7x great-grandmother Elizabeth.

In his will, written on 9 February 1763 and proven on 3 March 1764 by his son-in-law and executor John Evans (my 6x great-grandfather), William Howard, “being weak in body but perfect in mind and memory”, left his messuage and premisses to his eldest granddaughter Elizabeth Rickets, the daughter of his own daughter Eleanor. Eleanor herself is not mentioned in the will by name, which could suggest she had predeceased her father. On the other hand, Eleanor’s husband John Rickets, as well as his other children by Eleanor (William, John, Thomas, Mary and Ann) are all mentioned in the will as William Howard’s beneficiaries.

Besides Eleanor’s family, her sister Sarah also makes an appearance in the will. She was by then married to John Evans (both are mentioned by name), but, as already stated, there are no further references to Sarah’s other siblings Thomas, Alice and Anne. However, William Howard does mention one Elizabeth Lewis, who received ten pounds and whom he describes as “my daughter-in-law”.

If William Howard’s only son, Thomas, had presumably passed away, then he could not possibly have been Elizabeth Lewis’s husband. Furthermore, her married name would have been Howard, not Lewis (unless of course she married Thomas Howard, became a widow and remarried while still being considered William’s daughter-in-law, but there are no records to suggest this was the case). So how is Elizabeth Lewis related to William? This is explained if we consider one of the meanings of the term “daughter-in-law”, which at the time was frequently used to define what we would today call a stepdaughter (in contemporary records, daughters-in-law are often referred to as simply daughters, or more frequently, “X, the wife of my son Y”).

It is highly probable, therefore, that Elizabeth Lewis was actually the daughter of William’s wife Elizabeth – whose name his stepdaughter obviously bore. As I knew that William Howard had married Elizabeth Norgrove, as she was then, in Pembridge in 1717, surely his stepdaughter’s maiden name had to be Norgrove. And sure enough, I was able to find the marriage between a John Lewis and Elizabeth Norgrove, dated 31 December 1734 in Pembridge.

My attention then turned to William’s wife, Elizabeth Howard (formerly Norgrove). I found a transcript for the couple’s marriage record, registered in Pembridge on 29 June 1717, which interestingly enough listed Elizabeth as a widow. However, looking for a pre-1717 marriage between Elizabeth and a Mr Norgrove (and similar variants, including Norgrave and Horgrove) only drew blanks. There is a marriage between an Elizabeth Russell and a John Norgrove in Elton, Herefordshire – but it dates from 1719, which is obviously too late for “my” Elizabeth.

I then tried a difference approach. If Elizabeth had a daughter before she married William Howard in 1717, could I perhaps locate the girl’s baptism record? I could, and I did: Elizabeth Norgrove, baptised in Pembridge on 4 March 1711 – mother’s name Elizabeth Norgrove, father’s name… blank. Now there’s an unexpected twist! Was little Elizabeth illegitimate?

I now had in my power two somewhat contradictory records: Elizabeth Norgrove declared that she was a widow when she married William Howard in 1717, and yet she seems to have given birth to a girl while being unmarried in 1711. Lack of supporting evidence to suggest that the elder Elizabeth married before that time leads me to believe she was not, in fact, widowed, and that she was perhaps trying to conceal her daughter’s illegitimacy. I do not know how much William would have known about her past – I do not even know whether he lived in Pembridge before his marriage to Elizabeth – so it is conceivable that she chose to conceal her story by inventing a deceased first husband. Having lived in Pembridge for a number of years, however, makes me suspect that Elizabeth would not have been able to hide an illegitimate birth for long, and William Howard surely must have been aware that his wife’s maiden name was, in actual fact, Norgrove.

If we turn our attention to possible baptisms for Elizabeth Norgrove (later Howard), we soon come across the only option which, to my delight, fits the bill beautifully: on 5 October 1684 a Elizabeth Norgrove (daughter of Humphrey and Joanna Norgrove) was baptised in Dilwyn, which is less than five miles away from Pembridge. But genealogy isn’t about making the pieces of the puzzle fitting in. It’s about proof. So, how can I be sure that this is indeed the same Elizabeth who later married William Howard?

The short answer is that I can’t, unless I can find a will or a similar record that will confirm these various family relationships. I half-suspected that John Evans (Sarah’s son and Elizabeth’s grandson) may have been marrying a relation when he married a Mary Lewis in Pembridge in 1773, but alas with a common name like Lewis, proving that potential link would be a mammoth task. The only shred of supporting evidence that I can offer – and this is only potentially – is that one of Humphrey and Joanna Norgrove’s three other daughters was called Eleanor – the same name that Elizabeth later gave to her eldest child by William Howard. This may be an almighty coincidence, but in all other respects so far all the pieces of the jigsaw fit perfectly.

Of course, there are still many mysteries to unravel. William Howard died in 1763 or 1764, but he left behind a widow. So when did Elizabeth die? And what of their children, Thomas, Alice and Anne, who vanished into thin air? Did they die as youngsters, as I suspect they did? And when did William and Elizabeth’s daughter Eleanor Rickets die? I still don’t even know where William came from, and Howard is not a very common surname in Herefordshire – which begs the question: where was William born?

All the same, I am cautiously optimistic that my link to the Norgrove is looking fairly steady, and hopefully one day someone out there will read this article and provide much-needed supporting evidence to support my theory.

Richard Hatchett (1583-1654/55)

As I continue to delve into my Shropshire roots, today I would like to tell you about my 11x great-grandfather Richard Hatchett. According to several sources, including Gareth Williams’ “The Country Houses of Shropshire”, Richard was born in Acton Reynald in 1583. Acton Reynald is a small hamlet within the boundaries of the parish of Shawbury, a village about eight miles northeast of Shrewsbury, Shropshire’s county town.

Entry of baptism for Richard Hatchett, son of Robart (sic). Richard’s godparents are mentioned below, including his godfather Robart Waters – probably a maternal relation.

Indeed, the surviving parish records for Shawbury include the baptism, on 26 October 1583, of a Richard Hatchet (sic), son of Robert Hatchet. The name of Richard’s mother is not mentioned on the baptism entry, but a marriage between a Robert Hatchett and Eline Waters on 22 September 1577 would suggest that Elyne was Richard’s mother. Perhaps more conclusively, the names of Richard’s godparents are both mentioned on his baptism certificate, and his godfather is recorded as being Robert Waters, the same surname as Elyne’s. Richard was not the couple’s only child, for Robert and Elyne also had at least one other daughter, Margery, who was baptised in May 1579.

Entry of marriage between Robart (sic) Hatchett and Elyne (sic) Waters, Shawbury.

The notes on Volume 8 of the “Visitation of England and Wales”, edited by Frederick Arthur Crisp in 1909, states that Richard’s wife was called Alice, and that they married on 4 February 1611 [N.S.]. The couple are noted in the same source as having had six children, namely Stephen, William, John, an unnamed daughter who married Isaac Jones of Chilton, Sarah and Alice. Except for William (who, it is to be understood, probably predeceased his father), this information is consistent with Richard’s will written in early 1655, which mentions all of his children. Again, the daughter married to Isaac Jones in not mentioned by name, but I have since proven that her name was Susan.

Although Richard’s early life was spent in the parish of Shawbury and, following his marriage to Alice, in Ellesmere, it seems that by the 1620s the Hatchetts had moved to Peplow, in the village of Hodnet, where they took up residence as tenants of one Sir Robert Vernon.

In the “Antiquities and Memories of the parish of Myddle”, written by Richard Gough, of Newton, Shropshire, in the year 1700, the author relates the following about Richard Hatchett (whose great-grandson and namesake was married to Gough’s daughter Elizabeth):

The coat of arms of the Bulkeley-Owen family of Shropshire, male-line descendants of Richard Hatchett who adopted a different surname many years after his death.

Richard Hatchett […] was a wealthy father in Peplow, under Sir Robert Vernon, of Hodnett; att what time Sir Robert Vernon, (who was owner of all Peplow and Ellerdine,) had mortgaged the whoale Towne of Ellerdine unto Sir Richard Newport, of High Ercall, for a great sum of money, which mortgage was expired, and the money called for. Now there was four tenants in Peplow which were very wealthy persons – viz., this Richard Hatchett […]. To these four, Sir Robert sent to borrow the sum of money to pay off the mortgage; butt they consulted togeather, and made excuses: and thereupon Sir Robert swoare, that now child of any of the four persons should live upon his land, after theire leases were expired: butt Richard Hatchett removed beefore his lease was expyred; for hee was so plagued and plundered by the soldiers in the warre time, that hee was forced to remove to Shrewsbury.

Be it by design or by sheer serendipitous coincidence, Richard Hatchett elected to move to Shrewsbury, where he bought several houses and was made a burgess of the town’s corporation in early 1625 [N.S.]. By the time he reached old age, his elder daughter Susan had married Isaac Jones, son and heir of William Jones, of Atcham (whose late mother Mary Gratewood was a kinswoman of the Vernon family mentioned above). His eldest son, Stephen, described as a person of good repute in this country, lived at Lee, near Ellesmere, a property which either he or his father had purchased from a Mr Charleton. As for his brother, Richard Gough goes on to to say:

John married with Margarett, a bastard daughter of Mr Ditcher’s, of Muckleston; for this Ditcher had noe legitimate child, but was very rich. This John Hatchett had a great fortune with his wife, beside that Estate that was given him by his father: butt hee lived above it all, and therefore it was noe marvell that hee dyed poore. His widow after his decease, was placed in one of the Almeshouses at Lytle Berwicke, and there shee dyed.

Lack of further references to his wife Alice make me suppose that she died before Richard. She appears to have been alive in February 1640 [N.S.], although no further references to her seem to have survived. On the other hand, despite fathering at least six children, only Richard’s eldest son Stephen Hatchett and daughter Susan Jones appear to have left issue. As for his remaining younger daughters Sarah and Alice, they were both living and unmarried in early 1655, but whether they ever married or had descendants is not known.

Richard Hatchett, a successful Shropshire yeoman and my 11x great-grandfather, died in his 72nd year in February 1655 and was buried on the 10th day of that month. Although only a handful of records specifically refer to him as an individual, it is remarkable that over four centuries on it is still possible to find some details about his interesting life.

Opening lines of Richard Hatchett’s will, dated in January 1655 [N.S.].

Mary Crowther (1707-1779?)

This is the story of my seven times great-grandmother, Mary Crowther. Very little is known about her – and yet, through a handful of records, it is still possible to reconstruct what must have been some of the most important milestones of her life.

Mary was probably born in the spring of 1707, as she was baptised on 6 May of that same year in the church of St Peter, in the hamlet of Diddlebury (Shropshire), about five miles north-east of Craven Arms. Her parents, John and Elizabeth Crowther, had probably married only a few years earlier, as the baptism of their eldest daughter, Elizabeth, was recorded in January 1705. In 1710 the couple welcomed their third child, Anne, who would be followed by twin daughters, Martha and Margery, baptised on 25 October 1713. Sadly, neither girl survived the perils of a double birth at a time of unsanitary obstetrics – they were both buried six days after their baptism.

Diddlebury’s Church of Saint Peter. Source: Historic England.

Tragedy would continue to haunt young Mary’s life for years to come. Although her mother Elizabeth had almost miraculously survived the twin girls’ birth and subsequent tragic loss, within ten months she herself would pass away – quite possibly as a result of yet another unsuccessful pregnancy.

The loss of his wife and at least two young children left John Crowther, a humble church warden, responsible for raising Mary and her two surviving sisters, Elizabeth and Anne. It is therefore unsurprising that he chose to marry a neighbour, Sarah Lealoe, the following year.

As the middle daughter in a family of orphaned children, Mary probably matured quicklier than most children of her age, though it is hoped that the arrival of a new stepmother would have alleviated some of the most arduous domestic duties. Her father’s second marriage produced three children in quick succession: Sarah (1716), John (who only lived a few weeks in 1718) and William (1720). These new arrivals were overshadowed by the sad loss of Mary’s eldest sister Elizabeth, who died at the age of 13 in September 1718.

In February 1725 Mary’s father John Crowther died, leaving his second wife a widow to care for his eldest surviving daughters Mary, Anne (from his first marriage) and Sarah (from his second). I do not know what became of his youngest son, William, who would have been five years old at the time.

Parish register showing the marriage of Edmund Lokier and Mary Crowther in 1730.

With few means to sustain her, Mary Crowther very likely looked for employment in Diddlebury or a nearby parish. On 20 May 1730 she married Edmund Lokier; both he and the bride were described as “of the parish of Hawford” (sic), which probably refers to the parish of Halford, barely five miles away from Diddlebury. The fact that her two sisters appear to have married in nearby Eaton-under-Heywood (Anne in 1732 to a John Pinches; and Sarah in 1744 to a Edward Harris) might suggest the sisters stuck together for several years.

Edmund and Mary Lokier settled in the neighbouring parish of Wistanstow and would go on to have two sons during their short-lived marriage: Edward, born in 1732, and John, who died within a few days of his birth in November 1734. About six months later, Mary was left a widow when Edmund himself passed away at what must have been a comparatively early age.

Despite her youth (she was still in her late twenties), Mary Lokier had gone through a string of devastating family losses: not only had she lost her mother and sisters as a child, but she also witnessed the death of her father, elder sister and younger half-brother by the time she was a teenager, and she now had to endure the loss of a new-born son and her husband. One can only suppose that having to care for her surviving son Edward, and perhaps through the support of her sisters Anne and Sarah, she eventually pulled through.

By January 1739 [N.S.] 32 year-old Mary was once again on the brink of matrimony – only this time her husband was a man who was not yet 19. Vincent Hammond, from the parish of Wistanstow, was thirteen years her junior, and although his family had owned several properties in that part of Shropshire, and boasted several connections to influential families, he seems to have gone into the employment as “huntsman” of one Edward Acton, of Acton Scott, to make ends meet.

Parish register showing the marriage of Vincent Hammond and the widowed Mary Lokier (née Crowther), 1739.

Whatever their financial circumstances, Mary’s choice of husband seems to have given her the stability she would have undoubtedly needed. She and Vincent only had one child, a daughter: my six times great-grandmother Eleanor Hammond.

It is difficult to pinpoint Mary’s date of death – there is no shortage of Mary Hammonds buried in Shropshire after 1739 – but I believe one probable candidate is the Mary Hammond who was buried in Eaton-under-Heywood in 1779. If it is so, she may have been buried there at her own behest in order to be laid to rest near her beloved sisters Anne (who was buried in Eaton on 10 November 1760) and Sarah (who was buried in the same parish on 5 December 1754). If Mary indeed lived until 1779, she would also have witnessed the arrival of four grandchildren through her son Edward Lokier, and a further six through her daughter Eleanor (who became Eleanor Crump upon marriage in 1760). An additional grandson, Lancelot Crump, who would go on to join the army as a soldier of the 58th Regiment of Foot and saw military action during the Napoleonic wars, was born less than two years after Mary’s death.

Mary Crowther, aka Mary Lokier, aka Mary Hammond, was my seven times great-grandmother. By the time she was a teenager she had known more adversity and tragedy than most of us go through in a lifetime. Even though her story can be reconstructed through a handful of records, her life is an example of stoicism, endurance and survival. I am immensely proud to have her blood flowing in my veins.

My ancestor Eleanor Cam (1587-????)

This is the biography – as far as I am able to tell it with the limited documentation I have been able to find so far – of my 11x great-grandmother Eleanor Jones, née Cam.

Eleanor Cam, who would later become Eleanor Jones, was born in Shrewsbury probably in the summer of 1587, the second (and possibly the eldest surviving) daughter of Richard Cam and his wife, the former Katherine Fisher. The couple had been married two years earlier in St Alkmund’s Church, Shrewsbury. Eleanor was baptised on 19 August 1587 according to the rites of the recently established Church of England, which was at the time still very much in its infancy. In fact, it is somewhat bewildering to think that it is quite plausible that Eleanor’s parents or more likely her grandparents had been born into the old Roman Catholic faith, prior to Henry VIII’s break from Rome in 1534.

Eleanor had an elder sister called Dorothy, who had been born less than a year after their parents’ wedding. No further records mention her – for instance, unlike her younger sisters, Dorothy is not named in her mother’s will in 1627 – leading me to believe that she probably died young. Eleanor’s own birth would be followed by the arrival of another sister, Mary (who later married the Yorkshire clergyman and preacher Thomas Kay, who carried out many improvements to the famed Reader’s House in Ludlow) and a brother called Thomas, who perpetuated the surname Cam to the next generation. All four siblings were baptised in the church of Saint Julian’s, Shrewsbury, though the family seems to have relocated within a few years to the town of Ludlow, in the south of Shropshire.

On St George’s Day (23 April) 1604, not quite yet having reached her 17th birthday, Eleanor Cam was married to William Jones, son and heir of Thomas Jones, gentleman and owner of Chilton farm, in nearby Atcham. The Jones were an old gentry family which not only produced several clergymen and aldermen, but also a mayor of Shrewsbury and, several generations later, married into the Bingham family, being the forefathers of the Earls of Lucan. However the match came about, the marriage between Eleanor Cam and William Jones was almost certainly advantageous from the bride’s point of view, as her husband owned several pieces of property which would have assured her an easy and comfortable existence.

The entry of marriage between William Jones and Eleanor Cam, 23 April 1604.

William and Eleanor Jones are known to have had at least five children, all of whom were born between 1606 and 1624 – although the nineteen-year period and the lack of sources during a crucial thirteen-year gap could well mean that other children were born to the couple, and that they either died young or are otherwise unrecorded. The eldest-known child was called John – he is referred to as the eldest in his maternal grandmother’s will – and he was baptised in Shrewsbury in 1606. The second son was called Isaac, and although his birth year is not known, he must have been born well before 1621, which was the year when he entered Shrewsbury School. His next surviving brother was christened Samuel, although his year of birth is unknown; he would be followed by another brother, Thomas (1621), and a sister, Katherine (1624), who was given her maternal grandmother’s Christian name.

The name of William and Eleanor’s middle son, Samuel, could well indicate a possible kinship with Samuel Fisher, a 17th-century English Puritan clergyman. We must remember that Fisher had been the maiden name of Eleanor’s mother (who, having been married in 1585 and who died in 1627, was probably born in the 1550s or 1560s). If Samuel Fisher was indeed related to Eleanor, then he was not the only clergyman in her immediate family: Eleanor’s own sister Mary would eventually marry the Yorkshire clergyman and preacher Thomas Kay, while Thomas and Mary’s daughter Abigail eventually married Richard Fletcher, rector of Ludlow. Several of Eleanor’s descendants through her granddaughter Eleanor Hammond also followed a career in the church. In short: with so many clergymen populating Eleanor’s family tree, it certainly seems plausible that Samuel Fisher was some sort of relation.

Samuel Fisher himself was the son of John Fisher, who made his will in Shrewsbury in 1650. The Fishers hailed from Northampton (John Fisher left money to the poor of one of the parishes in that town), but settled in Shrewsbury at some point in the early 1600s, if not earlier. Besides Samuel, John Fisher had three children named John, Mary and Katherine (names which are found profusely in Eleanor’s family tree, as we have seen), and Samuel was also the name of John’s uncle. Was Eleanor naming her son in the 1610s in honour of one of her older relatives? It is definitely a tantalising possibility…

The latter half of Eleanor’s life is still a mystery. Her husband died in 1664, though whether she predeceased or survived him is not yet clear. The name Eleanor would be given to a great number of her descendants (variants such as Elinor, Ellen or Nell can be traced down her line right up until the 20th century), and her blood still flows today in the veins of her descendants through her second son Isaac, my 10x great-grandfather and the eventual heir of Chilton farm.

The opening lines of the will drawn up in 1627 by Eleanor’s mother Katherine Cam, née Fisher.

It is a truth universally acknowledged…

…that wills are the most amazing source of family history. They can just as easily reveal new names to add to one’s family tree, or reveal a forgotten family secret – like a disinherited relative, an illegitimate child, or a reference to a fabulous fortune left to your ancestors by a generous relation. Wills have been playing an important role in my family history research lately, and it’s all down to a lovely lady called Ann, whose husband is a distant cousin of mine from Australia.

Ann has been into genealogy for years, and a few weeks ago she contacted me after coming across my blog article on my Hammond ancestors – an article which, I’m happy to say, confirmed her own research and helped me back my prior investigations. What I did not expect is for Ann to reveal the true identity of one of our mutual female ancestors, whose maiden name was a total mystery until very recently.

As explained in my previous blog article on the Hammonds, my 9x great-grandmother Eleanor, the wife of Vincent Hammond, had to have been born around the 1650s – her first child being baptised in 1679, her eighth and youngest in 1696. As far as I could tell, Eleanor may also have had family links to the Shropshire village of Atcham, near Shrewsbury, as it was there that her two eldest children had been baptised.

I also speculated that Eleanor’s father may have been called Isaac, since it was the name given to her second-born son – her eldest son’s name, John, was extremely common on her husband’s side of the family. Initially I thought that Eleanor’s father was Isaac Griffiths, purely on the basis that there was a man with that name whose daughter was baptised in the right place at the right time. To my delight, my newly-discovered cousin Ann also told me of her suspicion that Eleanor’s father was called Isaac, but she went a step further and told me that Eleanor’s maiden name could have been Jones, in light of a will she had unearthed some time ago.

Extract of the will, left by Richard Hatchett, of Peplow, written in January 1655 (N.S.). He bequeaths 40 shillings to his grandchild Eleanor, daughter of Isaac Jones.

The will in question, available for free download via The National Archives website, was drafted in January 1655 (N.S.) by one Richard Hatchett of Peplow, Shropshire, at a time when Eleanor would have been an infant. In the will, the elderly gentleman left his goods and property to several of his closest relatives, specifically mentioning his second daughter Sarah, his youngest daughter Alice, his eldest son Stephen, and his youngest son John. There is an additional daughter whose existence is implied (as she was neither the second nor the youngest), and yet her name is not mentioned. Fortunately, however, Richard Hatchett does mention his granddaughter Eleanor Jones, daughter of his son-in-law Isaac Jones. Could this be the same Isaac whom I suspected of being my Eleanor’s father, and therefore that her unnamed mother was Richard’s missing elder daughter? I felt I was on the brink of adding an extra generation and several new names to the family tree, but I still needed hard proof!

Fast-forward about thirty years. On 16 March 1687 Isaac Jones himself drew up his will. His name is given as “Isaac Jones, of Chilton”, which is in Atcham – the same parish, we must remember, where my Eleanor had given birth to two of her eight children a few years earlier. Unfortunately, the will is not very detailed, although it does provide a list of goods and chattels that Isaac bequeathed to several of his living relatives – including his “loving wife Susanna“. At least I now knew the name of Richard Hatchett’s missing eldest daughter!

Extract of the will left by Isaac Jones, of Chilton, in 1687. In it he mentions his wife Susanna, his son William, and three of William’s children – but Isaac’s other children are not mentioned.

The only other relatives mentioned in Isaac’s will are his three grandchildren called William, Eleanor and Martha, the children of his eldest son William. Unfortunately, the will does not mention any of Isaac’s other children (their existence is implied through later wills), despite the fact that he had at least three called Samuel (an Anglican minister), Sarah (Mrs Stokes) and Joseph, a lawyer who later briefly became mayor of Shrewsbury. The fact that none of these children were mentioned in Isaac Jones’s will gave me reason to hope that his daughter Eleanor – my purported ancestor – was also left out because she too was at the time married and had received a settlement upon marrying Vincent Hammond. But how to prove it?

It was not until much more recently, in the course of a Zoom call with my newly found cousin Ann in Australia, that the penny dropped. Ann revealed that she had a copy of the will left in 1715 by Eleanor’s husband Vincent Hammond, and in it he mentions “my dearest wife Eleanor and her brother Joseph Jones“.

Extract of the will left by my 9x great-grandfather Vincent Hammond in 1715. In it he explicitly refers to his wife Eleanor and her brother, Joseph Jones.

Not only did I now have irrefutable proof that Vincent Hammond’s wife was indeed called Eleanor Jones, but I was also able to attach her brothers and sisters, parents and even her paternal grandfather to my family tree with absolute confidence. I did not even have to rely on the fact (which at first I believed to be nothing more than a coincidence) of common names and places, and the pattern of naming children in one family after maternal relatives. It now follows that Eleanor Hammond was born in about 1654, or there abouts, just in time for her to have been mentioned in her maternal grandfather’s will in early 1655. Her marriage settlement (and those of her brothers and sisters once they married in the 1680s, i.e. prior to the death of their father Isaac in 1694) probably meant that Eleanor and her siblings had little to gain from their father’s will. Eleanor survived at least two of her children, as well as her husband by just over six years.

With such a common surname as Jones, I definitely did not expect to be able to trace the line any further, but Isaac is an uncommon enough name to make it stand out even in contemporary records. Isaac Jones must have been born sometime in the early 1600s, possibly before 1623, as that was the year when the so-called Visitation of Shropshire was carried out. The Visitation was put together by two heralds to record the lineages and arms of families of note who lived in Shropshire at the time. Isaac makes a very discreet appearance as the son of William Jones, himself son and heir of one Thomas Jones, of Chilton, who was in fact still alive when the Visitation was drafted. I therefore have good reason to believe that the information in the visitation – at least, the details surrounding Thomas’s immediate family – is reliable.

Isaac’s mother (and William’s wife) was Eleanor, daughter of Richard Cam, of Ludlow – no doubt where her granddaughter, and my direct ancestor got her name from. William himself was the son of Thomas Jones by his wife Maria, daughter of John Gratewood, of Wollerton, in the Shropshire parish of Hodnet. Although the Gratewoods were not included in the Visitation of 1623, their connections leave me in no doubt that they were a family of note. Maria (or Mary) Gratewood and Thomas Jones had married in 1567 in Hodnet, and because “John Gratewood, gent., de Wollerton” died two years later (see Melocki, Hodnet registers), I am pretty sure that he was present at his daughter’s wedding.

A detail of the 1623 Visitation of Shropshire compiled with the help of Thomas Jones, of Chilton. Not only did he declare his son, daughter-in-law and grandsons’ names, but also that of his wife and his father-in-law, proving his connection to the Grat(e)wood family.

John Gratewood would have been born sometime in the early 1500s, and while his marriage record may no longer exist, his wife’s identity can be ascertained through various other sources. The most valuable of them is, without a doubt, the will made in late 1560 by his brother-in-law Rowland Hill, who is noteworthy for many reasons, not least for being a Member of Parliament and the first Protestant Lord Mayor of London! Although a Shropshireman by birth, Rowland Hill became a rising star in the London of the mid-Tudor period, and was well respected during the reigns of Mary and Elizabeth. Because he had no surviving issue, his will is peppered with the names of several relations. Among them are Alice Corbet, “the daughter of my sister Jane” and “William Gratewood, her brother”, implying that Alice’s maiden name was Gratewood and that therefore she and her brother William were Rowland’s niece and nephew through his sister Jane.

Portrait of Rowland Hill, M.P. for Soulton and the first Protestant Lord Mayor of London. His sister Jane married into the Gratewood family.

Unfortunately Rowland Hill’s will does not specifically mention Maria/Mary Gratewood, who a few years later would marry Thomas Jones of Chilton. Nevertheless, her paternity can be positively ascertained through the 1623 Visitation of Shropshire. More to the point, the parish register of Hodnet, where Wollerton is located, mentions the burial in 1553 of one “Juna (sic) Gratewood” – no doubt Maria/Mary’s mother Jane.

Finding a link to an illustrious relative like Rowland Hill has not turned out easy to prove, but I am satisfied that contemporary evidence has allowed me to add him to the old family tree with all the confidence I need. Naturally, given the hundreds of years between Rowland Hill’s death and the present day, he must have thousands of living “nieces” and “nephews” around the world. While I have yet to uncover many of his close kinsfolk, I was rather struck by the fact that he was related by marriage to another famous Mayor of London.

No one else among Rowland Hill’s relations benefited as much from his will than Thomas Leigh, the husband of his niece, Alice Barker (daughter of another of Hill’s sisters, called Elizabeth). Like Rowland, Leigh was so distinguished that he was knighted in 1559 by Elizabeth I, becoming Sir Thomas Leigh. He is not the last Mayor of London to make his appearance on the family tree: Sir Thomas’s son-in-law, George Bond, became Mayor of London in 1587. His daughter Dionise appears to have been married to Henry Winston, and their grandson, Winston Churchill (1620-1688) is the ancestor not only of his namesake, Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill, but of Diana, Princess of Wales, the Dukes of Marlborough, Prime Minister James Waldegrave, Lady Susan Hussey (who was prominently featured in the news this week), the late comedian Humphrey Lyttelton and the present-day Duke of Alba.

As if that were not enough, another of Sir Thomas Leigh’s grandsons, William Leigh, holds the key to my connection to yet another famous relative. This William Leigh was the great-grandfather of Thomas Leigh, whose daughter Cassandra Leigh was the mother of one of my favourite novelists, the one and only Jane Austen. It is through the Austens that I can also claim a family link to actress Anna Chancellor (“Duckface” in Four Weddings and a Funeral), film producer John Brabourne (the son-in-law of the ill-fated Lord Mountbatten) and Denys Finch-Hatton, whose love affair with Karen Blixen inspired her world-famous novel (and the world-famous movie) Out of Africa.

Phew! I think I’ve overdosed on genealogy research for a while…!

Jane Austen, my great-great-great-great-grandmother’s 8th cousin.

The Hammonds – a Shropshire family saga

What follows is a report of my research into the Hammond family of Hatton, in the parish of Eaton-under-Heywood (Shropshire), which later settled in Aston Botterell and Church Stretton, as well as Gawsworth (Chesire), Tolland (Somerset) and Charlecote (Warwickshire). The purpose of this article is not that of a classical blog post – to merely inform and entertain my readers – but to dispel some of the rumours and errors which populate a significant number of online Hammond family trees. Any corrections or new discoveries will be added to this article as they surface. Like any genealogist, I cannot pretend that my research is 100% accurate; however, I am confident that the conclusions and sources quoted will be enough to render my findings sufficient accuracy and credibility. If you have any comments or queries, or wish to make any suggestions or corrections, please email me via the address you will find under Contact.

IMPORTANT NOTICE: To quote this article or any information (including images) therein, please use the following reference: SMITH RAMOS, Daniel. “The Hammonds – a Shropshire family saga.” The Genealogy Corner (https://thegenealogycorner.com/). April 3 2022.

The first Hammonds

I have no reason to believe that all Hammonds in the world (or even in Shropshire, for that matter) are all descended from the same common Hammond ancestor. The family I am descended from – the subject of my research – appear to originate in Hatton, a hamlet of the parish of Eaton-under-Heywood, in Shropshire. There are references to Hammonds in the said parish as early as the 1600s, though the absence of documentation means it is impossible to establish a solid family link between the various individuals they refer to.

A family tree, preserved in Shropshire Archives under the reference Hamond/Gough (Hamond of Hatton; Gough of Oldfallings) Fletcher, W.G.D., 40 suggests a family link between the Hammonds of Hatton and the Goughs of Old Fallings (Staffordshire). A closer investigation into the information contained in this family tree, probably drawn up in the early 1800s, shows that it contains many mistakes and contradictions, which makes it a wholly unreliable source.

The Hammond family line begins with someone whom I will refer to as N.N. Hammond. This is because his name is unknown to me at the time of writing this article (spring 2022). What I do know is that this individual likely had at least four children (one son and three daughters). However, only the Christian names of two of them (John and Jane) are known, while the existence of the other two daughters is inferred through secondary sources. Indeed, in his own will drafted in early 1683, John Hammond explicitly refers to his three sisters as Jane Davies, Mrs Jenkes and “my sister Passie” (probably Passey, her married name). No further clues are offered as to the sisters’ abode, age or marital status at the time, although the will does mention a Thomas Jenkes and a William Passie. Another, more distant relative generically referred to in two sources as a “cousin” of the Hammonds is one German Hammond, who lived in Aston Botterell.

The Hammonds of The Ford, Aston Botterell (Shropshire)

Before delving into the main Hammond line (i.e. John’s), I will take a short detour to explore what little information I have been able to find on the life of the aforementioned German Hammond. I have not been able to locate his baptism record, although chances are he was probably born in Shropshire and that the original document has been lost to history. His date of birth therefore remains a mystery, though a rough calculation of about 1660 is probably a fair estimation considering he married in 1684 and died in 1729.

On 3 May 1684 German Hammond married Mary Low (d.1734) in the market town of Ludlow, a place with many associations with the Hammond family. No further clues are provided in the record as to their abode, their origin or indeed German’s occupation, but the couple lived at The Ford (presumably what is now known as Ford Farm) in the parish of Aston Botterell, near Bridgnorth. German and Mary Hammond may have had several children, but references survive for only two of them: William, who was baptised in Aston Botterell in June 1689, and Richard, who must have been very young when he died and was subsequently buried in the same parish almost exactly a year after his brother’s baptism. German Hammond died in July 1729, when he was probably in his 60s. His only surviving son, William, did not outlive him long, for he was buried on 1 September that same year. This information is consistent with a record dated 1732 [TNA ref. C 11/1786/23], which refers to Mary Hammond and Elizabeth Hammond as the widows of German Hammond and William Hammond, respectively. Both men are also referred to as “yeomen”, which gives us some indication as to their station.

When William Hammond died aged 40 in 1729, he left behind a wife and at least four children: Mary (born 1722), Thomas (1723), Elizabeth (1726) and Anne (1729), who was born a few weeks before her father’s death. William’s heir, Thomas Hammond, is referred to by name in the aforesaid record kept at the National Archives. He may well be the same Thomas Hammond “born in Aston near the market town of Ludlow” who in 1788 retired from the 2nd Troop of Horse Guards, after a service of 22 years serving in turn under Baron Cadogan, Lord Robert Bertie and Jeffery Amherst [TNA ref. WO 121/4/169].

The Hammonds of Hatton, Eaton-under-Heywood (Shropshire)

John Hammond, the son of N.N. Hammond, was born sometime during the first half of the 1600s. The absence of a baptism record means that his age at the time of his death in March 1683 can only be calculated through secondary information. John was married to a woman called Susan (or Susannah), whose maiden name and origins are unknown. Their marriage likely took place in the 1640s, since their third known child was born in approximately 1652. Seven children are known to have been born to the couple, though only the baptisms of the two youngest, Paul and Jane, survive. The other children were Mary, Vincent, John, Bernard and Susan. All but one of the seven are mentioned in their father’s will, dated 19 March 1683 [TNA ref. L6/1234]; it is likely that the missing child, Paul, predeceased his father.

A family tree showing John and Susan Hammond’s seven known children and their spouses. William Palmer, of Ticklerton, married Mary Hammond in 1672 and after her death, married her younger sister Susan in 1685.
Author’s property.

John Hammond’s will is quoted in online sources as being dated 1682 or 1683; the confusion arises from the fact that England did not adopt the Gregorian calendar until the mid-18th century, when the start of the year was moved from 25 March (known as Lady Day) to 1 January. In other words, according to contemporaries, John Hammond made his will in 1682 because it is dated 19 March, i.e. only a few days before the end of the calendar year according to the Julian calendar. From our point of view, John was actually living in the third month of 1683, if we applied the Gregorian calendar we use today. At any rate, John himself must have died very soon after making his will, as he was buried three days later on 22 March 1682/1683.

John Hammond’s signature as it appears on his will, drafted 19 March 1683 shortly before he died.
Herefordshire Archive and Records Centre.

In his will, John is referred to as “John Hammond of Hatton”. This hamlet is located within the boundaries of the Shropshire parish of Eaton-under-Heywood, approximately half way between Ludlow and Shrewsbury. The will makes very interesting reading, for it lists the various relatives to whom John Hammond left his properties and personal assets. Thanks to the will, it is also possible to infer several family relationships besides his children, namely his aforementioned sisters and cousin, as well as a grandson called John Hammond (the son of his eldest son Vincent, born in 1681).

John’s eldest daughter Mary is referred to in her father’s will as Mary Palmer, implying that she had married by then. This is consistent with the marriage entry, dated 28 April 1672 in Eaton-under-Heywood, which shows Mary Hammond of Hatton marrying William Palmer, of Ticklerton – Ticklerton being another hamlet within the same parish. I have found no evidence to suggest that William and Mary Palmer had any children of their own; in fact, Mary seems to have died shortly after her own father (she would have been most probably in her early to mid-30s). Because she was already married, and had therefore likely received a dowry upon marrying William Palmer, Mary was only endowed in her father’s will with £10 (roughly equating to £1,150 in 2017 values), while her younger sisters received significantly larger amounts.

On 19 June 1685 Mary’s widower William Palmer married her younger sister Susan Hammond, who had been bequeathed by her father a little under £34,000 in today’s money. Although the wedding took place in Bridgnorth, all six of their children (Elizabeth, Susannah, William, Thomas, Mary and John) would be baptised in Eaton-under-Heywood between 1686 and 1695. Of the six, only Susannah and John are mentioned by name in their uncle Bernard’s will of 1704 – although this is not necessarily indicative that the other brothers and sisters had passed away by then. Indeed, in early 1721 one of the middle sons, Thomas Palmer, married Lucretia Hibbins, the daughter of the late reverend Henry Hibbins, of Stokesay, Shropshire. The Hammonds’ links to members of the Anglican clergy would, as we will soon see, become a common trend throughout subsequent generations.

Entry of marriage in Bridgnorth for William Palmer, Gent. and Susanna Hamond (sic) in 1685.
FindMyPast.

William Palmer, of Ticklerton, died in 1705 and was buried on 22 May in Eaton-under-Heywood, where he had been church warden for a number of years. His widow Susan outlived him by almost 25 years, dying on 16 January 1730/1731 in Ludlow. Incidentally, the parish register for Eaton-under-Heywood mentions a marriage between a “Mrs Susannah Palmer” to the Rev. John Taylor in 1720, but she should not be confused with the aforementioned Susan Hammond who had married William Palmer 35 years before. In fact, John Taylor’s wife was Susan Palmer (née Hammond)’s daughter – the term Mrs being at the time used as a sign of deference for women of rank, rather than to exclusively denote married women. The confusion between mother and daughter arising from their names, which is admittedly a mistake very easily made, can be dismissed straight away considering that John and Susannah Taylor’s five children were all born between late 1720 and 1730, by which time Susan Hammond (later Palmer) would have been in her late 60s.

Now we have covered the lives of John Hammond’s two eldest daughters, let us focus on his third and youngest daughter, Jane, before turning out attention to John’s three surviving sons and their descendants. Jane Hammond was baptised on 13 December 1664. Like her elder siblings, she is mentioned as one of the beneficiaries in her father’s will in 1683. In the said document, she was to receive £260 (just under £30,000 in modern values) upon her father’s death, with an additional income of £10 per annum over the next three years, payable by her brothers Vincent and Bernard from the benefits arising from their respective livings. It would be another four years before Jane herself became a married woman, for on 29 April 1687, in the parish of Much Wenlock, she married Timothy Gravenor (sometimes spelt Grovenor or Grosvenor). Timothy is described in several sources as a “gentleman” and “of Whitbach and Upper Hayton”, near Stanton Lacy, just north of Ludlow. The couple appear to have had at least two children: Elizabeth, who died young and was buried in Cleobury North in early January 1693; and John, who was born in April 1692 and is mentioned in his uncle Bernard Hammond’s will twelve years later.

Timothy and Jane Gravenor lived in Cleobury North for a brief period in the early years of their marriage. It was in that location that Jane’s widowed mother, Susan, passed away in 1699, and it was also there where Jane’s brother Bernard drafted his will five years later.

Timothy Gravenor died in Stanton Lacy in 1734, while his widow passed away in April 1743, having outlived all of her siblings. The couple’s only known son, John Gravenor, is referred to in a 1717 document [TNA ref. 1037/21/87] as the couple’s heir and a gentleman “of Womaston”. By that time, John had been married for some years to a woman called Teverea, who ultimately died in 1749 and was buried in the cloister of St Mary’s Cathedral in Worcester. The couple had at least one son called Thomas who was baptised in Cleobury North in 1715, but little else is known about him. John Gravenor may be the same John Grosvenor (sic) who was buried in Stanton Lacy in 1760.

Let us now turn our attention to John Hammond’s three surviving sons: Vincent, John and Bernard. Although baptism records for the period are incomplete or have not survived, their birth order can be deduced thanks to a number of sources and supporting evidence. Vincent was unquestionably his parents’ eldest son (if not their eldest child), as he is described as “my eldest brother Vincent” in Bernard’s will in 1704. As the first-born son and heir to his father’s property in Hatton, Vincent was also the first to marry and sire children (he became a father by 1679).

On the other hand, John was almost certainly the second son. He was admitted “as a poor scholar” to Christ Church College, Oxford on 26 February 1668/1669 at the age of 16 – thus placing his year of birth at around 1652-1653. Additionally, The Manor of Gawsworth, by Raymond Richards, features a short summary of John Hammond’s career, and states that he died in April 1724 when he was in his 73rd year – which is also consistent with a probable birth year of 1652 (and not 1662, as many online sources suggest). This middle brother would not marry until his later 30s, after taking up the position of rector of Gawsworth, in Cheshire, as we shall see presently.

Bernard (who married in 1681) was therefore the youngest of the three brothers, having been born in around 1653 – if a later notation of his burial in 1723, when he was supposedly 70 years old, is to be given any credence. This is also consistent with the will left by the elder John Hammond in 1683, which specifically mentions his four youngest children in what we may suppose is their order of birth: “John, Bernard, Susan and Jane”. We may also consider the fact that, in the same will, John Hammond of Hatton bequeathed varying amounts of money to all his younger children, while his first-born son Vincent was granted the family property in Hatton. In view of this evidence, we may suppose that Vincent was very probably born in the late 1640s, followed by John in about 1651/1652 and Bernard around1652/1653.

Hatton Cottage, Eaton-under-Heywood. This old farmhouse turned parish workhouse still bears an inscription “H.V.E. 1679” for Vincent and his wife Eleanor Hammond.
Historic England.

Let us focus on the eldest son: Vincent Hammond, the eldest of his parents’ sons, inherited the Hatton properties bequeathed to him by his father in his will. He seems to have resided in Hatton most of his life, except for a brief period in the early years of his marriage, but besides that, I know very little about this ancestor of mine – he is my 9x-great-grandfather. By 1679 he had married Eleanor Jones, the eldest daughter of Isaac Jones of Chilton and his wife, the former Susan Hatchett. The newlyweds first lived in Eleanor’s native Atcham, near Shrewsbury – it was there that their two eldest children would be born.

The couple’s first daughter, Susanna, was born in 1679, but sadly in Atcham in May 1682 aged two and a half. Their next child, John, was also born in Atcham, but unlike his elder sister, he reached adulthood. He is also mentioned in his paternal grandfather’s will in 1682, when he would have been about two years old. Vincent and Eleanor Hammond moved to Eaton-under-Heywood in around 1683 – no doubt in order to take possession of the family property of Hatton following old John Hammond’s demise. By the following September, Eleanor had given birth to her second son, Isaac (died 1685), who was obviously christened in honour of her father. The boy would be followed by Bernard (1686), Eleanor (1687), Katherine (1690), Samuel (1694) and Vincent (1696).

Burial entry of Vincent Hammond of Hatton, dated 11 October 1718.
FindMyPast.

Vincent Hammond of Hatton died in October 1718, when he would have been in his late 60s, and was buried in Eaton-under-Heywood, where his father’s remains had also been laid to rest. His wife Eleanor outlived him by eight years, dying in 1726, probably in her 71st year. Of their six surviving children, only three sons are known to have married: in 1703 John married Mary Hammond (a possible relation) and had six children; Bernard was married in 1710 to Rebecca Minton, one of the heiresses of Richard Minton of Minton, and had ten children; and Vincent, who married Mary Kyte in 1725, but probably remained childless. Eleanor, the eldest-surviving daughter, very probably became the wife of Samuel Pountney in 1709, by whom she had at least three sons.

Vincent’s brother Bernard Hammond – the third and youngest of John and Susan Hammond’s three surviving sons – was probably born in about 1653, as explained above. In 1681 – according to Alan Dakers’ book Ticklerton Tales, which is partially reproduced online – Bernard Hammond, of Ludlow, purchased a mesuage in Hatton from Richard Wredenhall, of Downton; the property had previously belonged to William Acton, of Henley, whose wife Jane had been the daughter of one Richard Hammond, of Hatton – a probable kinsman of Bernard’s. That same year, Bernard married Mary Cheffe, by whom he had five children named Elizabeth, Susanna, Anne, Richard and Mary, though only the eldest daughter seems to have reached adulthood. Bernard and his wife Mary spent the first four years of their marriage in Ludlow prior to settling in Eaton-under-Heywood. After being widowed in 1697, Bernard lived for some time in Cleobury North, prior to moving to Burwarton, where his eldest daughter lived after her own marriage. In 1705 he acted as executor of the will left by his late brother-in-law William Palmer, and is described as a resident of Ticklerton at the time.

In 1697 Bernard suffered two great personal losses when his wife and youngest daughter Mary died within days of each other, possibly as the result of an infectious disease. With his other children already dead, this double tragedy left only Bernard and his eldest daughter, Elizabeth, as the sole survivors within their immediate family unit. Five years later Elizabeth married Thomas Holland, of Ludlow, on the occasion of which she very likely received a substantial dowry from her father. This is inferred by Bernard’s own will of 1704, in which he left his surviving daughter and her husband a mere £5 each, while his remaining financial assets (worth over £128,000 in today’s values) were divided between other relations. Those who benefitted the most from Bernard’s will were without a doubt the three sons of his elder brother John, who is already referred to in the document as rector of Gawsworth, Cheshire: John’s eldest son, also called John, was to receive £300 (worth approximately £32,000 today); Davenport Hammond was to receive £200, the same as his next brother George, while their remaining sister Susanna only got £100. Bernard Hammond also granted legacies to various other relatives: his nephew John Palmer, of Ticklerton (son of his sister Susan) received £50, as did his cousin John Gravenor, the son of Bernard’s sister Jane. On the other hand, his other nephew and namesake, Bernard Hammond (his brother Vincent’s second son) received £100.

Opening lines of the 1704 will left by Bernard Hammond of Cleobury North.
The National Archives.

While Bernard’s exact date of death is not recorded, a handwritten (and definitely non-contemporary) note on the Burwarton parish register records Bernard dying in 1723 aged 70 – thus making 1653 the likeliest year of his birth. This information, however, contradicts the fact that on Burwarton parish church there is a memorial to Thomas Holland, his wife Elizabeth and his father-in-law Bernard Hammond, on which it states that he died in 1724. Whatever the case may be, what is certain is that Bernard had passed away by February 1725, when his will was proved at Ludlow by his grandson William Holland (Elizabeth herself having predeceased her father in 1721).

As Bernard Hammond’s most senior living descendant, William Holland thus became the head of the family before he even attained his legal majority. Not long after turning 21, he married Anne Lea, of Little Hereford, by whom he had two sons and four daughters, though only one of the girls is thought to have married and had issue. The daughter in question, named Elizabeth in memory of her grandmother, contracted a somewhat late marriage in 1772 to Benjamin Baugh, a gentleman of Ludlow, by whom she had one known daughter called Harriet (1778-1854). In 1796 Harriet herself made an advantageous marriage by becoming the wife of the Hon. Gustavus Hamilton (later 6th Viscount Boyne), a scion of the Dukes of Abercorn and a direct descendant of the famous Gustavus Hamilton who fought at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 against the forces of the deposed James II – for which he was later ennobled by George I. The 11th and current Viscount Boyne is therefore a direct descendant of my relative Bernard Hammond through his daughter Elizabeth Holland, and is my 10th cousin (once removed).

The Hammonds of Gawsworth (Cheshire), Tolland (Somerset) and Charlecote (Warwickshire)

Sir Fulke Lucy (1623-1677), the MP for Cheshire and owner of Charlecote Park who posthumously became the father-in-law of John Hammond, rector of Gawsworth.
National Portrait Gallery.

But perhaps the most glittering of all marriages was the one contracted between John Hammond’s middle son, John, to a member of the one of the oldest and most well-established families in England. Born in 1651 or 1652, and being a second son, John Hammond‘s prospects of ever inheriting much of the family’s property in Shropshire were never very great. Knowing the financial limitations he would have faced, his parents decided at an early age to destine him for a career in the church. At the age of 16 he matriculated “as a poor scholar” at Christ Church College, Oxford, receiving his B.A. in December 1672 and his M.A. in July 1675. In 1683 – the year of his father’s death – he was appointed rector of the parish of Gawsworth, in Cheshire, where he would remain as the incumbent for the next 41 years. The move to Cheshire was to prove a fortuitous decision, for it was there that he probably became an acquaintance of Alice Lucy, daughter of the late Sir Fulke Lucy, of Henbury, MP. The Lucys had been a prominent in the West Midlands for many generations; Sir Fulke’s great-grandfather, Sir Thomas, is notorious for having been in conflict with – and allegedly prosecuting – William Shakespeare. Sir Fulke’s father, another Sir Thomas, was a politician who sat in the House of Commons on several occasions between 1614 and 1640. Upon his death that year, his son Fulke inherited Charlecote Park, in Warwickshire – which is today owned by the National Trust and is still recognised as one of the greatest country houses in England (albeit much altered since Sir Fulke’s day).

John Hammond, rector of Gawsworth, thus became acquainted with the family of Sir Fulke Lucy, and on 16 April 1689 married his eldest daughter, Alice Lucy. As she had four living brothers, little could John Hammond suspect at the time that almost a century later his own grandson would be called upon to inherit the Charlecote estate.

Extract of the parish register of Prestbury, Cheshire, showing the marriage of “Mr John Hammond[,] Parson, Ms Alice Lucy”.
FindMyPast.

John and Alice Hammond were soon blessed with the arrival of a son, whom they named John. The record of his baptism has not surfaced, but based on the evidence of his uncle Bernard’s will, and given that his younger brother was born in May 1691, there can be little doubt that John must have been born sometime in late 1689 or more probably in the first half of 1690. John’s birth was followed by those of Davenport (1691), George (1693), Henry (who died within days of his birth in 1694) and Susannah, who was born in October 1697. Some sources cite an additional daughter called Isabella, who later married Jeffrey Power in 1718 in Gawsworth, but there is no contemporary evidence to prove that Isabella was indeed John and Alice Hammond’s daughter.

A presumably posthumous portrait of the Reverend John Hammond (rector of Tolland) painted in around 1720 by an unknown artist. Although it is said to represent the eldest son of John Hammond and Alice Lucy, it is more likely to be of John Hammond, rector of Gawsworth.
National Portrait Gallery.

The rapid succession of births probably took its toll on Alice Hammond, who did not survive her fifth confinement and was buried two days after the baptism of her daughter Susannah.

Many online sources and family trees incorrectly state that Rev. John Hammond fathered additional children from a supposed second marriage to a Rebekah Bayly, of Macclesfield. While a marriage between Rebekah Bayly and a John Hammond did indeed occur in Gawsworth in 1701, the groom was definitely not the same man as the local rector. There are several reasons for this deduction: firstly, the John Hammond who married in 1701 is not referred to in the marriage register as being the “rector” (unlike all other previous instances in which his name is mentioned in the parish books). Secondly, there are no supporting documents (e.g. wills, memorials, etc.) which refer to Rev. John Hammond ever having taken a second wife. Thirdly, and perhaps more importantly, the various entries of baptism for John and Rebekah’s children throughout the next decade after their marriage all state that their father was a butcher (see caption below). This is consistent with the baptisms I have been able to find so far for Joseph (1703), John (1704), Elizabeth (1707), Sarah (1707) and Edward (1709). In short, Alice Hammond, John Hammond’s first – and only – wife, died in 1697 leaving him to care for their four surviving children, namely John, Davenport (who married Mary Coldcraft in Westminster in 1724, and died childless in Wandsworth, Surrey in 1754), George (who became rector of Hampton Lucy and married Alice Underhill in 1724, having by her two short-lived sons) and Susannah (who married Jeremiah Henderson, of Kinderton, before dying a widow in Middlewich, Cheshire in 1775; none of her three children left any descendants).

The marriage entry in Gawsworth of one John Hammond, butcher, to Rebekah Bayly. It is often misattributed to be the second marriage of John Hammond, rector of Gawsworth, after the death of his wife Alice Lucy.
FindMyPast.

John Hammond, rector of Gawsworth, died in April 1724 and was buried on the 15th that same month. His eldest son, another John Hammond, also became a clergyman and was by then rector of the parish of Tolland, in Somerset. His marriage in 1717 to Sarah Morley produced seven children: Susanna (born in Minehead in around 1718); Sarah (who died unmarried aged 23), a son called Lucy (born in Hasle), Alice (who died unmarried in 1790 aged 66), Elizabeth (who died of smallpox in 1730 aged 5), George (who also died that same year and of the same disease, aged 3) and John, whose life we shall explore subsequently.

John Hammond, the third clergyman in a line in his family, who in 1786 unexpectedly inherited Charlecote Park from his father’s cousin, subsequently taking the surname Lucy.
National Portrait Gallery.

John Hammond, rector of Tolland, died in the said Somerset parish in April 1757 when he was in his 67th year. He was survived by his wife and at least two of his children. His only surviving son, John Hammond, was also destined for an ecclesiastical career. He may well have remained an insignificant footnote in history, were it not for the death in 1786 of 71-year-old bachelor George Lucy, his first cousin once removed. George Lucy, who was a nephew of Alice Lucy, John’s paternal grandmother, had himself unexpectedly come into his family’s inheritance (including the Charlecote estate) after the death of his own uncle William Lucy (his father Fulke having been disinherited for being a drunkard and a gambler, and his elder brother being barred from the succession for being an “epileptic”). But George Lucy himself vowed never to marry, preferring to keep mistresses and enjoy the pleasures that life could afford him. On his death, the main Lucy line became extinct and, lacking close relations, he bequeathed his properties to John Hammond, the grandson of his paternal aunt, but on the condition that he use the Lucy surname from then on. Thus, in 1787 Rev. John Hammond became Rev. John Lucy, and took up residence in Charlecote.

His new situation now meant he must seek a wife to perpetuate the Hammond/Lucy lineage, and so, in 1788, 55-year-old John Lucy married Maria Lane, who was half his age. The couple had three sons, the youngest of whom died young. The middle son, John, followed his father’s steps and became a vicar, while the elder son, George Hammond Lucy, inherited Charlecote on his father’s death in 1823.

George Hammond Lucy’s marriage to Mary Elizabeth Williams, of Bodlewyddan, Denbighshire, is well documented in her memoir Mistress Of Charlecote, which was later published by the wife of one of her descendants. Charlecote itself underwent significant alterations during the 19th century, but none of the improvements saved the Hammond/Lucy family from financial ruin. The male line of the Hammond/Lucy family descended from Rev. John Hammond of Gawsworth became extinct in 1909, after ownership of Charlecote had passed to George Hammond Lucy’s granddaughter Ada. Her son, Sir Montgomerie Fairfax-Lucy, who inherited the residual estate in 1943, presented Charlecote to the National Trust in-lieu of death duties in 1946.

Charlecote Park, which was in the property of the Hammond (aka Lucy) family from 1786 to 1946.
Wikimedia Commons.

Selected sources:

• FindMyPast, Ancestry and Melocki.org.uk
• The National Archives
• National Portrait Gallery
• Mistress of Charlecote, a memoir by Mary Elizabeth Lucy
• Ticklerton Tales, by Alan Dakers

New relatives, new mysteries

Back in the day when I first researched my Italian-American grandfather’s life and origins, I remember partially uncovering the personal story of his paternal grandfather, my Italian great-great-grandfather Vincenzo Ameglio. Vincenzo – as far as the family knew – was an agricultural labourer born in the north of Italy around the mid-19th century. He was also a very absent father, since – according to family lore – he had abandoned his wife Margherita and their only child, my great-grandfather Giacomo, because he found Margherita to be “very difficult to live with”. Consequently, it was the jilted wife Margherita who raised her son single-handedly. In time, the general perception within the family was that her difficult character was an excusable trait, given the abandonment and neglect she would have faced. In short, it was her runaway husband Vincenzo who was vilified by the family for over a century.

Until a few months ago, no one knew what became of Vincenzo. According to his granddaughter, the family always believed he had moved away, possibly to Genoa, and he was not heard from since. He already appears to have been absent by the time his wife Margherita gave birth to their son in late 1886, leading me to wonder whether Vincenzo ever clapped eyes on his own son.

Giacomo’s 1886 birth certificate states that his father could not register the birth because he was “far away from this place”.

Searching for a death certificate in a country like Italy, without knowing where to look – particularly in a large city such as Genoa – would have been akin to looking for a needle in a haystack. Therefore, rather than embarking on a quixotic research campaign without much hope for success, I decided to go back to square one and focus on the very place where Vincenzo had been born. The staff at the civil registry of Nizza Monferrato, his hometown, were extremely kind and trawled through index after index for any reference to Vincenzo’s death. Bear in mind that, in Italy, when someone dies, the death is registered under the registry’s main section in the town where the death took place (Parte I); but if the person happened to die in a different town, then their death would also have been communicated to their hometown’s civil registry office, which would in turn register a transcript of the original certificate on the section known as Parte II. It was therefore quite probable that, even if Vincenzo had died in Genoa – or elsewhere – his death would have still been registered in either section of Nizza Monferrato’s civil registry. What I did not expect to find out was that he actually died in Nizza Monferrato itself!

Now that I knew Vincenzo had lived out his last years in the town neighbouring that where his estranged wife and son lived, I began to wonder if he was indeed the absent father I always imagined him to be. At least the chances of Vincenzo and Giacomo meeting – even if rarely – now seemed definitely higher.

The porticoed streets of Nizza Monferrato, where my great-great-grandfather Vincenzo was born – and where eventually he died.

Vincenzo’s death certificate states that he died in 1917 at the age of 58. Margherita is still mentioned as his wife, though of course the couple had not cohabited for many years. There are no further clues as to the latter part of Vincenzo’s life, but two names leapt off the page instantly when I first saw the record: they refer to the people who went to register the death. On the one hand, 33-year-old Giuseppina Ameglio (same surname as Vincenzo’s) and 33-year-old Francesco Berta, whose link to Vincenzo seemed a total mystery.

Who was Giuseppina Ameglio, and why had she been tasked with registering my great-great-grandfather’s death in 1917? Her age meant that she was probably born in 1884, making her too old to have been born from the same union as my great-grandfather Giacomo (remember that Vincenzo and Margherita were married in 1886, and he abandoned her and their unborn son a few months later). I suspected she was some sort of close relation – possibly Vincenzo’s niece – and that she may have been among the relatives that Vincenzo went to live with when he left his wife years earlier.

In order to find out who this Giuseppina Ameglio was, I requested a copy of her birth record from the civil registry in Nizza Monferrato. Imagine my surprise when I received the certificate stating that Giuseppina was the daughter of none other than Vincenzo himself! Her mother, as would I suspected, was not my great-great-grandmother Margherita, but someone called Teresa Chiorra. So it turns out that Vincenzo had actually been married once before his wedding to the woman he would later abandon!

Giuseppina’s birth record clearly states that Vincenzo Ameglio was her father. Her mother, Teresa Chiorra, died days after the birth of her daughter.

A few more requests addressed to the civil registry office helped me to fill in the remaining gaps: Vincenzo and his first wife Teresa were married in early 1884; before the year was out, Teresa had given birth to the couple’s daughter Giuseppina. Sadly, Teresa died less than two weeks later – one can only assume, as a consequence of childbirth. Vincenzo was therefore left a widower, emotionally bereaved, still young at 27 and now with a baby to look after. It should not be surprising, therefore, that just over a year later he decided to remarry.

Here is where things become hazy. Based on family lore, and in view of later events, I can only imagine that Margherita’s “difficult character” extended not only towards her husband, but also towards her step-daughter. I have no reason to believe that she was in any way cruel or unkind towards little Giuseppina, but the fact that the marriage apparently broke down fairly rapidly after his second wedding, and that Vincenzo appears to have moved away in a hurry – taking his little daughter with him – could be indicative that there was some degree of coldness between Margherita and Giuseppina too. We will probably never know.

It soon became clear to me that Vincenzo, far from being the villain of the story, simply may have been the victim of a series of tragic losses and emotional miscalculations. First his first wife died unexpectedly, then his second marriage soured very quickly… I can sympathise to a certain extent with him in that he wanted to move away, even if it cost him his relationship with his unborn son Giacomo.

While Giacomo was being raised single-handedly by his mother Margherita, Vincenzo and his daughter Giuseppina’s lives seem to have moved on too. Vincenzo lived to see Giuseppina’s 1909 wedding to Francesco Berta – that’s the other person mentioned on Vincenzo’s death certificate a few years later. Interestingly, Giuseppina’s half-brother Giacomo is not among the witnesses who attended her wedding – which may be indicative that the two never had much in a way of a brother-sister relationship. Who knows if they ever met at all! What we do know is that in 1917 Vincenzo died in the presence of his beloved daughter Giuseppina. She outlived her father by a further twenty-two years, dying in Nizza Monferrato a few weeks after the outbreak of the Second World War.

Certificate of marriage between Francesco Berta and my great-great-aunt Giuseppina, in 1909.

Interestingly, Giuseppina’s death certificate provides the names of the two people who recorded her death: Giacomo Berta and Vincenzo Berta, who were 29 and 27 at the time. As you may know, in Italy it is traditional that children take their grandparents’ names, and usually the first-born son is named after the paternal grandfather, while the second is usually named after the maternal grandfather. This seemed like a good indication that Francesco Berta and Giuseppina Ameglio had at least two sons, and that they were named after their parents’ respective fathers. Sure enough, the couple had three sons: Giacomo (b.1910), Vincenzo (b.1912) and Ernesto Berta (b.1917). But wait! There’s more!

The fact that I knew that Giuseppina’s husband predeceased his wife, but was still alive in 1917 when his father-in-law died (and when his third son was born), I decided to check the online database of Italian soldiers who died as a result of the First World War. The chances of Francesco Berta being on it were slim, but Italy’s casualties during the war were extremely high and, at 33, Francesco would have still been young enough to be sent to the front. My suspicions were sadly confirmed when I found his name listed among the war dead: he did not die at the front, however, but in his hometown Mombaruzzo. His death, which occurred in April 1918, was due to “illness”, likely contracted as a direct consequence of the war. So, poor Giuseppina not only lost her beloved father in 1917, but she was also left a widow a year later – and with three young mouths to feed too!

Francesco Berta’s entry as a casualty of WWI, as listed on the “Caduti Grande Guerra” website.

Alas, that would not the end of the family’s link to the Italian army. Another chance search for this new branch of relatives on the Italian Ministry of Defence’s database of soldiers fallen in World War II brought up a rather unexpected match: Vincenzo Berta, Giuseppina’s middle son and the one named in memory of her beloved father, died (or disappeared) in the Soviet Union in April 1943 at the age of 30. Whether he died in combat, died as a prisoner of war or simply went missing, I do not yet know. This discovery has prompted me to learn more about Fascist Italy’s disastrous campaign in Russia, as an ally of Nazi Germany. I have also sent for Vincenzo’s military records from the State Archive in Alessandria (Italy), which I hope will provide further details about his life and sad demise.

Who knew a chance request for my great-great-grandfather’s death certificate would bring up a new branch of the family tree, and provide me with so many new details about my family history!