OFF THE RECORD
Alan wishes he could take his research back to medieval families he has found
Following a broken trail Alan Crosby considers the difficulties of tracing the deepest roots of your family tree
Using documents dating from the middle decades of the 14th century, I’ve been doing some landscape history research into parts of medieval Cheshire. My Latin is not up to scratch for reading such sources, but fortunately they’ve been printed and published with exact English translations – a real blessing! One aspect of the work that has particularly interested me is that some of my ancestors come from the area I’m looking at – and among the sources are lists of tenants on various manors, describing their landholdings and the amounts they paid in rent.
The obvious question is, “Were these people my ancestors?” It would be great to link back seven centuries and claim that some of the people listed in the documents were “mine”. It would be much better to identify where they lived, discover what land they worked, even build up a picture of their lifestyles. Unfortunately, and perhaps predictably, the era is shrouded in mystery – in the village in question I’ve so far only been able to get my family back to the late 1600s, and that leaves an unbridgeable 350-year gap. But I’m intrigued by the fact that my ancestors’ surname (Woodhouse) is found in some of the medieval documents from the area.
Perhaps – I can put it no more firmly than that – they were indeed my forebears, but proving it would be impossible. Not least, these were ordinary folk, humble smallholders and tenant farmers, and they only have passing references in the sources; these are formal estate documents, with minimal detail. No less problematic is that these documents themselves are few and far between – there are gaps of 50 or 100 years in the sequence, so it’s impossible to link the generations together.
For most of us, tracing medieval ancestors is at best a tentative exercise, and more usually is simply out of the question. The further back we go, the harder it becomes, because of the scarcity of sources and the difficulty of interpreting those that survive. Wills are uncommon before the Reformation, and in some areas more or less absent. There are no parish registers before 1538, and only a small minority of parishes have them so early. The survival of manorial records is very patchy, too.
We might look for answers in the heralds’ visitation books which, compiled in the later 16th and early 17th centuries, record the ancestry of the gentry. I’ve made use of them for another of my ancestral lines – only to discover that people 400 years ago were all too willing to fabricate a pedigree in order to tie themselves to some noble or influential family, particularly if they shared a surname. They mix up generations, or are vague about connections between individuals (“perhaps the son of…” immediately rings alarm bells).
But for me there is one shaft of light. My mother’s maiden name (Bagshaw) is common in the Peak District of Derbyshire and very unusual elsewhere. A pioneering DNA study was done 25 years ago on people with this surname, proving pretty conclusively that most people named Bagshaw, or descended from Bagshaws, are genealogically linked, and descend from one couple who lived in about the year 1200. What’s more, the place where they lived is known – the little hamlet of Bagshaw near Chapel-en-le-Frith.
So there you are – I can trace my ancestry back to early medieval times. However, there’s just one problem. The documentary trail takes me back to a marriage in 1602 – but before then it becomes fragmented and scanty, and there’s the small matter of 12 generations (a conservative estimate) where I don’t know anything but an occasional name, at most. Frustrating, but better than nothing – and to mention, casually, that I can trace my ancestry back to before Magna Carta sounds impressive, even if it’s not strictly true! Find out more about using Tudor records in the article beginning on page 54
People 400 years ago were all too willing to fabricate a pedigree to tie themselves to a noble family