Elizabeth Boulton and the Littleton family

My recent work on the life of Henry Crabb Boulton (1709 – 1773), Member of Parliament and East India Company director, has re-awakened my interest in the Boulton and Forrest families of London and Worcestershire. Henry Crabb Boulton’s great grandparents were William Boulton and Alice Forrest, the latter being the sister of my 9 x great grandfather, London citizen and haberdasher Thomas Forrest. The Forrest and Boulton families both appear to have had roots in the villages around Evesham in Worcestershire.

Early nineteenth-century map of the Evesham area in Worcestershire

Although I’ve managed to piece together a great deal of the history of the two families, mainly drawing on family wills that I’ve found online, I’ve hit a number of brick walls in my attempt to trace their Worcestershire origins. As a consequence, I’ve recently engaged a professional researcher, based in the county, to explore the local archives for me, and I look forward to hearing what she manages to discover.

Nevertheless, I continue to make occasional new discoveries of my own. For example, yesterday I solved the mystery of the first marriage of Elizabeth Boulton, one of the daughters of William Boulton and Alice Forrest. Probably born in about 1670 and almost certainly in the parish of All Hallows Barking, in the City of London, we know that Elizabeth married Navy Board official Martin Markland in July 1694. However, the parish record gives Elizabeth’s surname as Littleton rather than Boulton, even though we know from later records that Martin Markland was definitely married to Elizabeth Boulton.

St Botolph Aldersgate today (via Wikipedia)

Yesterday, I finally discovered evidence of Elizabeth’s first marriage, in 1686, to John Littleton. The marriage took place on 19^th June at the church of St Botolph Aldersgate, and both bride and groom were said to be of the parish of All Hallows Barking. But why choose St Botolph’s rather than their own parish church? The reason might be that the couple were married, according to the parish register, by a certain ‘Dr Littleton’.

Interestingly, it turns out that this was Dr Adam Littleton, who was (to quote one source) ‘born of an antient and genteel family…in Worcestershire’. Born in 1627, Adam’s father was Thomas Littleton, also a clergyman and vicar of Halesowen, then in Shropshire. Educated at Westminster School, Adam Littleton was elected to Christ Church, Oxford, in 1644 ,where he was a conspicuous opponent of the parliamentary visitation which purged the University of royalist sympathisers, writing a satirical Latin poem on the subject, and was expelled in November 1648. However in May 1651 he joined with three other students in a petition for the restitution of their scholarships, which seems to be have been successful. Appointed as an usher and then second master at his old school, after the Restoration Littleton taught at Chelsea where he was also appointed rector of the parish church. Besides his excursions into verse, Adam Littleton was the author of a number of theological texts and translations from Latin.

Satirical attack on the parliamentary visitation of Oxford, with contribution by Adam Littleton under the pseudonym ‘Redman Westcot’

Charles II made Littleton a royal chaplain, and he also served as a chaplain to Prince Rupert of the Rhine. In 1674 he became prebendary of Westminster Abbey, in 1683 rector of Overton in Hampshire, and in 1685 he was licensed to the church of St Botolph, Aldergate, where he served for about four years, thus confirming that he was indeed the Dr Littleton who married John Littleton and Elizabeth Boulton.

But what was Dr Adam Littleton’s relationship to John? Of course, the shared surname and the Worcestershire connection might be coincidence, but I think this unlikely. Since John Littleton must have been born by 1670 at the latest, it’s possible that he was Adam Littleton’s son. I’ve discovered that Dr Littleton was married three times. On 6^th March 1655 he married Elizabeth Scudimore at the church of St Mildred Poultry. On 24^th January 1667 he married Susan Rich of West Ham at St Andrew Undershaft. Finally, he married Susan Guildford, daughter of Richard Guildford of Chelsea, by which he acquired a fortune, but apparently he spent freely as a collector and, when he died in 1694, left his third wife in poor circumstances for the remaining four years of her life. It’s possible that John Littleton was the son of Adam Littleton by his first marriage, though I’ve yet to find any record of his birth or baptism.

The Littletons were an illustrious family, and they seem to have shared Adam’s royalist and High Church opinions. Adam’s father Thomas was one of five sons of Thomas Littleton of Stoke Milburgh, Shropshire, who died in 1621. The eldest son, Sir Adam Littleton, who was made a baronet by King Charles I in 1642, was the father of Sir Thomas Littleton, and the grandfather of another Sir Thomas who served as one of the lords of the treasury. Thomas Littleton of Stoke Milburgh had another son, Sir Edward Littleton, who served as Chief Justice of North Wales. His eldest son, also Edward, was Lord Keeper of the Great Seal under Charles I and was created Lord Littleton in 1640. A second son, William, was a sergeant at law, while two other sons, James and John, were Fellows of All Souls, Oxford. The latter was for a time Master of the Inner Temple, from which he was ejected in 1644. According to one source: ‘He and his family were staunch adherents to the royal cause, and in the course of 1642 he left London and joined the king’. Another Littleton brother, Nathaniel, was a gentleman in the Earl of Southampton’s company in the Low Countries, and another, Timothy, served as one of the barons of the Exchequer.

The Inner Temple

I wonder how Elizabeth Boulton came to meet her first husband, and what connections there might have been between the Boulton and the Littleton families? Did the link have its origins in their common roots in Worcestershire, or did it go deeper and touch on matters of shared political and religious opinions? We know that one branch of the Worcestershire Boulton family included a Nonjuror, whether Catholic of ‘High Church’ is unclear, who suffered deprivation of his property after the pro-Stuart 1715 uprising. This was Thomas Saunders of the hamlet of Moor near Fladbury, who married Margaret Boulton, Elizabeth’s sister, and whose grandson was Henry Crabb Boulton, with whom we began this post. Did these sympathies extend more widely in the Boulton family, and were my Worcestershire ancestors (unlike the Byne family of Sussex, with whom they would be linked by marriage) royalists rather than parliamentarians in the conflict that divided England in the seventeenth century?

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Henry Crabb Boulton (1709 – 1773)

In the last post I promised to summarise what I’ve been able to discover about Henry Crabb Boulton, the East India Company director and Member of Parliament, who (according to Ancestry) was my 3^rd cousin 8 x removed. In this post, I plan to write about Henry’s two families of origin: the Boultons and the Crabbs.

The Boulton family

As I noted in the previous post, my interest in the Boulton family derives from their connection by marriage to my Forrest ancestors. Both families appear to have had their roots in Worcestershire. I believe that the Forrest family came from the village of Fladbury on the River Avon, about five miles west of Evesham, and it’s possible that the Boultons had their origins in the same area.

Fladbury church and mill (via bbc.co.uk/history/domesday)

Some time in the early decades of the seventeenth century, two brothers and a sister were born into the Forrest family in or around Fladbury. William Forrest appears to have stayed in Worcestershire, where he either inherited or purchased property in the village of Badsey near Evesham. Thomas Forrest, my 9 x great grandfather, moved to London, where he set up in business as a haberdasher in the Tower Hill area. Thomas’ daughter Alice married Sussex-born stationer John Byne in 1675: they were my 8 x great grandparents.

Alice Forrest, the sister of William and Thomas, married a man named William Boulton some time in the 1650s or 1660s. It’s unclear whether they were married in London or moved there soon afterwards. We know very little about William Boulton and his origins, but we do know that the couple were living in the parish of All Hallows Barking, to the west of the Tower of London, in 1666, when they were paying hearth tax there. They were also included in a list of London inhabitants in 1695, by which time their children had all left home. At this time they were living in Chitterling Alley, in a medium-sized property with a total of eight hearths. It’s possible that William Boulton was a merchant or mariner and that he had connections with the East India Company, since at least one of his sons and three of his grandsons ended up working for the company.

Church of All Hallows Barking, London

Piecing together the information I’ve been able to glean from parish records and wills, I’ve come to the conclusion that William and Alice Boulton had the following children:

Richard Boulton worked for the East India Company, attaining the rank of captain, then as a ship’s husband or agent, with a financial interest in Blackwall Yard to the east of London. Richard lived in Crutched Friars in the parish of St Olave Hart Street. He appears to have remained unmarried and died in 1737.

Peter Boulton must have served in the army or navy, perhaps in the East India Company like his brother, since he attained the rank of major. Peter was a gunsmith in the City of London, living near Tower Street. His first marriage was to Elizabeth Bushell of Fladbury and his second to Posthuma Landick of Bath. Peter Boulton’s daughter Alice married Captain Richard Gosfreight in 1720. Peter and Posthuma Boulton owned property in Bath, to which they retired, and where Peter died in 1743.

Another son, possibly named William, married a woman named Bridget and they had two sons – William, and Captain Richard Boulton the younger. Richard, who worked for the East India Company like his uncle and namesake, also seems to have remained unmarried. He died at his property in Perdiswell near Worcester, in 1745.

Elizabeth Boulton married naval commissioner Martin Markland .The Marklands were neighbours of Major Peter Boulton in the parish of All Hallows Barking.

Mary Boulton married a Mr Lewes, about whom nothing further is known.

Finally, we come to a Miss Boulton, whose first name is still a mystery, but may well have been Hester or Grace, since these were the names of her daughters. This Miss Boulton married Thomas Saunders, a ‘gent’ from the hamlet of Moor, near Fladbury. Saunders was included in a list of non-jurors drawn up after the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, but I’m not sure what this tells us about his religious affiliation.

Thomas and Grace Saunders had three children: William, Grace and Hester. I haven’t been able to find out anything about William. Grace Saunders married London salter James Jemblin , probably in the first decade of the 18^th century, and they had a son named John and a daughter Elizabeth. Grace died, possibly giving birth to Elizabeth, and James remarried. Elizabeth Jemblin married Edward Bushell Collibee, who would later serve as mayor of Bath, and who was probably related in some way to the Bushells of Worcestershire. By 1740 John Jemblin was living in Evesham, where he may have inherited property from his father.

The Crabb family

We don’t know whether Thomas and Grace Saunders lived in Worcestershire or London: it’s possible that they owned property in both places. But we do know that their daughter Hester was living in the parish of All Hallows Barking in the City of London, close to her Boulton relatives, when she married Thomas Crabb on 12th October 1708, at the church of St Paul, Benet’s Wharf.

What do we know about Thomas Crabb? According to the marriage record, he was from Whitechapel, and he and Hester would live in that part of London for a time after their marriage. As for Thomas’ origins, to some extent they remain shrouded in uncertainty. I wonder if he was the son of Isaac Crabb who was paying tax ‘for house and vaults’ in Priest Alley in the parish of All Hallows Barking in 1715? It seems too much of a coincidence that his next door neighbour was Martin Markland, who was married to Hester Saunders’ aunt Elizabeth Boulton, and that the house after that was occupied by her uncle Major Peter Boulton.

Part of Rocque’s 1746 map of London, showing the area around the church of All Hallows Barking

This Isaac Crabb was a merchant who had been born into a family of Quaker clothiers in Wiltshire. He was almost certainly the Isaac Crabb of All Hallows Barking, who married the delightfully named Freelove Crispe, daughter of Thomas Crispe of Wimbledon, at St Nicholas Cole Abbey in September 1685. A case recorded in the National Archives concerns a dispute between Isaac Crabb on the one hand, and on the other side Thomas Crabb, a clothier of Marlborough, Wiltshire, and Thomas Crispe, a draper of London, concerning property in Wimbledon and Savernake Forest, Wiltshire. This may have been a disagreement over a marriage settlement, and it’s possible that Thomas Crabb was Isaac’s father.

At any event, Thomas and Freelove Crabbe had a son named Thomas christened at the church of St Dunstan in the East in London in 1687: this date would fit well with what we know of the Thomas Crabb who married Hester Saunders, making him twenty-one at the time of their marriage. The parish clerk at St Dunstan’s recorded Thomas’ mother’s name as ‘Trulove’, but by the time his sister Hester was christened in the following year, Freelove had reverted to her original (and possibly Quaker-derived?) first name.

Birth and early life

St Mary’s church, Whitechapel

Thomas Crabb and Hester Saunders were living in Leman Street, which ran north to south between Ayliff Street and Rosemary Lane, close to Goodman fields, when Henry, their first child, was baptised at the church of St Mary, Whitechapel, on 12^th September 1709. I haven’t yet found a christening record for Henry’s brother Richard, but other records lead me to believe that he was probably born in about 1710. I’ve found no evidence of any other surviving children born to Thomas and Hester Crabb.

Henry Crabb’s childhood is a blank as far as the records are concerned. The first definite date that we have for him, after his birth, is 1727, when he entered the office of the East India Company. Henry would have been about eighteen years old at the time. By this time his great uncle Richard Boulton the elder and his second cousin Richard Boulton the younger, would have been established figures in the East India Company, and no doubt their influence was of help in facilitating their young relative’s entry into the organisation.

Unlike his brother Richard, who became a sea captain like his Boulton relatives, Henry seems to have followed a purely deskbound career in the East India Company, but it was a career in which he rose rapidly through the ranks. By 1729, two years after joining, he was working as a clerk in the pay office. In the following year, he was appointed assistant paymaster and the year after that joint paymaster. By 1737, when he was still only twenty-eight years old, Henry was the East India Company’s sole paymaster and the clerk to their committee of shipping.

Heir and executor

The East India Company, by Thomas Rowlandson (1808)

1737 was also the year in which Richard Boulton the elder, of St Olave, Hart Street, in the City of London, made his will, appointing Henry as join executor with Richard Boulton junior and Richard Gosfright, to whom he entrusted the task of administering his various interests in the East India Company and Blackwall Yard. The elder Richard Boulton had no surviving children of his own, and had probably never married. Therefore the main beneficiaries of his will were the brothers Henry and Richard Crabb and their cousin John Jemblin, son of their mother’s sister Grace and her husband James Jemblin. However, these three were only to come into possession of their share of Richard Boulton’s estate upon taking to themselves the additional surname Boulton.

A codicil was annexed to the will, and this was witnessed by Francis Jemblin, James’ Jemblin’s son by a second marriage, and by Henry and Richard Crabb’s mother Hester, who is described in the record as a widow of All Hallows Barking, confirming that her husband Thomas Crabb had died by this date.

In the following year, 1738/9, Henry Crabb’s brother Richard got married, at the church of St Mary at Hill in the City of London, to Frances Heames. Richard was said to be of the parish of All Hallows Barking and Frances of the parish of St Peter within the Tower of London. Richard and Frances would have two sons, Richard and Henry, to whom we shall return.

Henry Crabb Boulton senior, however, seems never to have married. In 1745, the year of the Jacobite uprising, he and Richard became the beneficiaries of another will, that of their second cousin, Richard Boulton the younger, who had retired to the manor of Perdiswell on the outskirts of Worcester. Both brothers benefited from the will, and Henry was appointed sole executor: a tribute, perhaps, to the skills he had developed managing the payroll of the East India Company. Once again, we learn that Henry’s and Richard’s mother Hester was still alive, and living now at Tower Hill, London.

Member of Parliament and Company Director

From the early 1750s onwards until his death, Henry Crabb Boulton enjoyed a number of spells as a director of the East India Company. Then, in about 1754, he was first elected as Member of Parliament for Worcester, another sign of the Boulton family’s longstanding connection to that part of the country. The History of Parliament Online includes the following information about Henry’s parliamentary career:

In Dupplin’s list of 1754 he was classed as ‘doubtful’; but on 24 Dec. 1755 Sandwich informed Newcastle that Boulton had ‘attended and voted in every question in support of the measures of Government’. In 1761 Boulton was re-elected at Worcester after a contest. Bute’s list of December 1761 classes him as a supporter of Newcastle, and he voted with the Opposition on the peace preliminaries, 9 and 10 Dec. 1762; and on Wilkes, 15 Nov. 1763, and general warrants, 15 and 18 Feb. 1764.

Originally a follower of Laurence Sulivan in East India Company politics, Boulton later attached himself to Clive, and went over to Administration with him; Jenkinson reported to Grenville on 20 Apr. 1764 that Clive had said Boulton might be depended on, though ‘a great rogue’. Harris notes that during the debate of 1 Mar. 1765 on the bill to regulate splitting East India Company votes, Boulton was ‘at the head of the government party’.

In Rockingham’s list of July 1765 Boulton was classed as ‘pro’, and in that of November 1766 as ‘Whig’. When, on 9 Dec. 1766 Beckford moved for an inquiry into East India Company affairs, Boulton voted for the motion, and though he ‘said much against it, owned that the Company could not govern their servants, nor could Clive go on without the interposition of Government’.

No other votes by him are reported in this Parliament, but he spoke several times on East India affairs, and on 1 May 1767 when Beckford was again to move for an inquiry, Boulton, on behalf of the Company, informed the House that there ‘was now a prospect of accommodation with the ministry’. In Townshend’s list of January 1767 he was classed as ‘doubtful’, and in Newcastle’s of 2 Mar. as ‘doubtful or absent’. In 1768 Boulton was returned unopposed for Worcester.

For various periods in the 1760s, Henry Crabb Boulton served as chairman of the East India Company, the organisation that he had joined as a humble clerk in the pay office forty years earlier.

London and Leatherhead

Thorncroft

From about 1755, Henry Crabb Boulton’s name appears in directories as a merchant living in Crosby Square, Bishopsgate, in London. His brother Richard also seems to have lived in the same area. In 1763, Henry became the owner of Thorncroft manor in Leatherhead, Surrey, where he lived for the next ten years until his death. Apparently, the manor at Thorncroft had belonged originally to Sir Richard Dalton, but after taking possession in 1763 Henry Crabb Boulton commissioned Sir Robert Taylor to build a new house on the site of the old. The date of construction has been given as 1772 with further enlargements in 1800. The house apparently remains much the same today, though with some modern additions.

Henry Crabb Boulton died in 1773. In the next post, I’ll write about what we learn from his last will and testament.

Back to the Boultons

I’ve been corresponding with Deborah Kirk, who is researching the history of Langtons, a former manor house in Hornchurch, Essex. Debbie got in touch after she came across my posts about Captain Richard Gosfr(e)ight, who appears to have lived at Langtons in the early decades of the eighteenth century. However, it’s possible that Richard owned a different property in Hornchurch, and that Langtons was built after his death by one of his heirs.

Langtons, Hornchurch

My original interest in Richard Gosfright stemmed from the fact that his first wife was the daughter of Major Peter Boulton, a member of the family that was linked by marriage to my Forrest ancestors. I was first alerted to the connection between the Forrest and Boulton families by the wills of my 8 x great grandmother Alice Byne née Forrest, daughter of London haberdasher Thomas Forrest, and of Thomas’ brother William.

As well as family ties, Richard Gosfright also had business connections with the Boultons. Peter Boulton’s brother Richard was the partner, with four other former East India Company sea captains, in the ownership of Blackwall Yard, a shipyard on the Thames at London. Gosfright, a ship’s husband and former mariner like Richard Boulton, also had an interest in this concern. When Richard drew up his will in 1737, he appointed Gosfright, by then married to his niece, as one of the executors.

Blackwall Yard from the Thames, by Francis Holman (1729 – 1784)

Debbie Kirk has kindly supplied me with the details of both of Richard Gosfright’s marriages, which I had been lacking. As a result, I now know that the name of Richard’s first wife, the daughter of Peter Boulton, was Alice (this was also the name of Peter’s mother, who was born Alice Forrest) and that the couple were married in Romford in 1720. Their only daughter Mary was probably born in the following year. Alice Gosfright must have died shortly afterwards, perhaps in childbirth, since in 1729 Richard married his second wife, Catherine March. Thanks to Debbie’s detective work, I now know that this marriage took place in Calcutta, which suggests that Richard Gosfright was still working as a sea captain after his marriage, and also (perhaps) that Catherine belonged to a family with East India Company connections. It’s possible that Richard and Catherine’s two daughters, Sarah and Frances, were born in India, and this may explain why records of their births have proven hard to come by.

Calcutta in 1786. From an etching by Thomas Daniel.
(Via sankalpa.tripod.com)

When Richard Gosfright made his own will in 1746, he appointed two co-executors: his wife Catherine and his ‘good friend’ Henry Crabb Boulton. Henry, by then rising through the ranks of the East India Company and soon to be elected Member of Parliament for Worcester, was the second cousin of Gosfright’s first wife Alice, and the great-nephew, and principal heir, of his former partner Richard Boulton. For some time, I’ve been meaning to write more about Henry Crabb Boulton, and my correspondence with Debbie Kirk has now prompted me to do so. In the next post, I’ll try to summarise what I’ve been able to discover about Henry’s life.

Revisiting the Collins family of Epping

In the previous post I declared my intention to revisit the life of my 5 x great grandmother Elizabeth Gibson (1733 – 1759), and particularly her connection with the Collins family of Epping in Essex. Elizabeth’s first husband, whom she married in 1753 in what may have been a clandestine ceremony, was John Collins of Epping. John died some ten years later and I’m intrigued to discover how Elizabeth then came to marry her second husband, Joseph Holdsworth of South Weald. I have an inkling that understanding more about the Collins family might help me in this quest, and in this post I want to summarise what we know about them.

The ancient parish church of All Saints, Epping Upland

John Collins was baptised in Epping on 14^th January 1733. He was the son of local landowner Richard Collins and his wife Jane. Born in Epping in 1693, Richard was the son of another Richard Collins, also of Epping, and he in turn was the son of another John Collins. This is the first of three generations of the Collins family that we know about.

First generation 

Richard Collins (1), the son of John Collins (1) was baptised on 7^th June 1656 in Epping. Richard married Sarah Cowdlie on 31^st December 1683 at the church of St Botolph, Aldgate, in London. Interestingly, this was the parish church of the Gibson family, and of Elizabeth Gibson’s Byne and Forrest forebears. In fact, for some reason, and despite their deep roots in Epping, the Collins family seem to have made a habit of marrying in London churches.

Richard and Sarah Collins had four children that we know of: John (2) (1686), Sarah (1688), Richard (2)(1693) and Elizabeth (1697).

Second generation

Sarah Collins married Henry Small in 1708. They had six children: Mary (died 1710), Richard (born 1711), Sarah (1713), Henry (1718), John (born and died 1721) and Joshua (1722).

John Collins (2) married Mary Archer in 1722. They had a son named Richard. John Collins died in 1742.

Richard Collins (2) married Jane Stoker in 1727. They had seven children: Richard (3) (1730), John (3) (1733), Sarah (1735), Elizabeth (1737), William (1739), David (1740) and Jane (date of birth unknown). Richard Collins died in 1748 and his wife Jane in 1740.

Elizabeth Collins did not marry. She died in 1761.

Third generation: the children of Richard Collins (2) 

Richard Collins (3) married Ann Champain in 1747. They had two children: a son named Champain (date unknown) and a daughter named Ann (1757). Richard Collins died in 1770 and his wife Ann in 1775.

John Collins (2) married Elizabeth Gibson in 1753. They had a daughter named Frances (1759). John Collins died before 1763, when his widow Elizabeth married Joseph Holdsworth.

Sarah Collins married a man with the surname Dilworth: he may be the George Thomas Dilworth who married a Sarah Collins in 1758.

Nothing more is known about the lives of the four younger children of Richard and Jane Collins.

Revisiting the life of Elizabeth Gibson (1733 – 1809)

I continue to be fascinated by the life of my great-great-great-great-great-grandmother Elizabeth Holdsworth, formerly Collins, née Gibson. Born at Tower Hill, London, in 1733, Elizabeth was the daughter of coal factor John Gibson and his wife Mary Greene, and the granddaughter on her mother’s side of goldsmith Joseph Greene and his wife Mary Byne. Her great-grandparents included Sussex-born London stationer John Byne and his wife Alice Forrest, and Captain William Greene of Ratcliffe, who served as Warden of Trinity House under Samuel Pepys.

Woodredon House, now an equestrian centre

When Elizabeth Gibson was five years old her parents acquired the manor of Woodredon at Waltham Abbey in Essex, a gift from Elizabeth’s maternal grandmother Mary Greene, widow of Joseph. I assume that Elizabeth spent much of her childhood at Woodredon, and that was how she came to meet her first husband, John Collins, the son of a landowner from nearby Epping. In 1753, when they were both twenty years old, Elizabeth and John were married at St George’s Chapel, Mayfair, a church notorious for clandestine weddings.

We know very little about this first marriage of Elizabeth’s, and still less about her first husband John Collins, since he appears to have left no will and the date and cause of his early death remain a mystery. The only thing we know for sure is that the couple had a daughter named Frances, born in Darby Street, London, in 1759 and baptised at the church of St Botolph, Aldgate. Frances Collins would later marry John Godfrey Schwartz, who was probably her first cousin and almost certainly the son of Elizabeth’s sister Anne and her husband Charles Gottfried Schwartz.

John Collins must have died by 1763, when Elizabeth married for a second time. Her second husband, and my 5 x great grandfather, was Yorkshire-born farmer Joseph Holdsworth, who lived in the village of South Weald, Essex. I’ve often wondered how Elizabeth and Joseph met, but I’ve begun to think the answer might lie with Elizabeth’s relations from her first marriage to John Collins. For this reason, I want to spend some time, in forthcoming posts, revisiting the story of the Collins family, and the families whose lives intersected with theirs in the middle decades of the eighteenth century.

A confusion of Collibees

I’ve been trying to understand the connections between the Bushell and Collibee families of Bath, both of whom supplied the city with mayors and aldermen in the first half of the eighteenth century. There are so many references to members of the two families in each other’s wills that working out exactly how they were related to each other can be quite taxing. However, I think I’m beginning to make some progress.

I’m interested in these families because of their connection with Major Peter Boulton, the London gunsmith who died in Bath in 1743. He was the son of William Boulton and Alice Forrest, the latter being (I believe) the sister of my 9 x great grandfather, London haberdasher Thomas Forrest. Peter was married twice: first to Elizabeth Bushell, and secondly to Posthuma Landick, whose mother Elizabeth had been born a Bushell. Peter must also have been instrumental in arranging the marriage of his great niece Elizabeth Jemblin to Edward Bushell Collibee, an apothecary and sometime mayor of Bath. So how were the Bushells and Collibees connected, and how does Edward Bushell Collibee fit into this picture?

An apothecary in his shop (early 18th century)

Edward Bushell the elder of Bath mentions five surviving children in his will of 1701. John Bushell married Ann Matravers in 1689. They had a son named Richard. John died in 1703 and his son Richard died in 1715. Edward Bushell the younger married a woman named Mary. They appear not to have had any surviving children at the time of Edward’s death in 1724. Elizabeth Bushell married David Landick. Their daughter Posthuma, who was born in 1676, was the second wife of Peter Boulton. Frances Bushell and Ann Bushell were unmarried at the time of their father’s death.

John Bushell’s will of 1703 refers to his sister-in-law Mary Collibee, his brother-in-law William Collibee and his nephew George Collibee. John also appoints William Collibee joint guardian, with his own brother Edward Bushell the younger, of his son Richard.

The Mary Collibee mentioned in John Bushell’s will is probably the person of that name who made her own will in 1725. She certainly had a son named George, as well as other sons named Richard, Benjamin, William, Anthony and Edward, and daughters named Ann, and Mary Lewis, a widow. Mary Collibee also mentions her sister Anne Bushell, a widow: presumably she was the wife of John Bushell. If she is using the word ‘sister’ literally, to mean a sibling rather than an in-law, then it means that Anne Bushell and Mary Collibee must have had the same maiden name.

We know that Anne Bushell’s surname was Matravers when she married John Bushell in 1689. The 1717 will of William Matravers of Norton St Philip, about seven miles south of Bath, mentions ‘my cousin William Collibee apothecary’ as well as ‘my sister Mary Collibee and…her son Richard Collibee’, and ‘my sister Ann Bushell’. The clear implication here is that William Matravers, Anne Bushell and Mary Collibee were siblings, all born with the surname Matravers. I assume that the William Collibee mentioned here was Mary’s son, rather than her husband, and that therefore he was William Matravers’ nephew rather than his cousin.

To sum up: the Bushell and Collibee families were connected by virtue of the fact that two Matravers sisters, Anne and Mary, married a Bushell (John) and a Collibee (respectively).

However, this was by no means the only link between the two families. In his will of 1724, Edward Bushell the younger (John Bushell’s brother) mentions his two sisters Elizabeth Landick and Ann Collibee, the latter described in the ‘probatum’ appended to the will as the widow of William Collibee. Ann Collibee née Bushell is probably the person of that name who died in 1729, her will mentioning her son Edward Bushell Collibee. We know from other sources that Edward Bushell Collibee, who was himself an apothecary, was the son of William Collibee, also an apothecary, and that he was born in about 1707.

So Anne Bushell, daughter of Edward Bushell the elder, must have married William Collibee the younger some time between her father’s death in 1701 and the birth of her son Edward Bushell Collibee in about 1707. The will of Ann Collibee née Bushell described Peter Boulton as a cousin. By his second marriage to Posthuma Boulton, Anne’s niece (the daughter of her sister Elizabeth Landick), he was strictly speaking a nephew, or rather a nephew-in-law.

Bushell, Collibee and Boulton

I’ve been revisiting the Forrest family, a branch of my maternal family tree with roots in London and Worcestershire. Thomas Forrest, a London citizen and haberdasher who died in 1678, was my 9 x great grandfather. His daughter Alice married Sussex-born stationer John Byne (1651 – 1689): they were my 8 x great grandparents. In the last post I reported some new information about the Forrest family and the families that were linked with them by marriage, including the Boultons, a number of whose members were leading lights in the East India Company. I’m fairly certain that both families had their origins in Worcestershire, probably in the area around Fladbury on the River Avon between Evesham and Pershore. I believe that another Alice Forrest, who was almost certainly Thomas Forrest’s sister, married William Boulton, and that they migrated to London some time in the mid-seventeenth century.

Bath Abbey (via Wikipedia): site of many Bushell and Collibee births, marriages and burials

Since writing the last post, I’ve discovered some more information about Major Peter Boulton, one of the sons of William and Alice Boulton. As reported before, I’m now quite sure that Peter Boulton was married twice. His first marriage was in 1691 to Elizabeth Bushell of Fladbury and they seem to have had two children, Elizabeth and Alice. Elizabeth must have died by 1699 when Peter Boulton married for a second time, to Posthuma Landick of Bath. In the last post I noted my suspicion that Peter’s original connection to Bath, to which he and Posthuma would retire, perhaps some time in the 1730s, was through his first wife Elizabeth Bushell. It was the fact that Peter Boulton’s great niece Elizabeth Jemblin would marry Bath apothecary and sometime mayor of the city Edward Bushell Collibee, that first made me suspect that the Bushells might have a connection with the city, and that this might explain how Peter came to be living there. Searching for information about the Bushell and Collibee families of Bath, I discovered a large number of wills from the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries. Purely by chance, the first of these wills that I read contained a reference to Peter Boulton. Not only that, but there was also the hint of a link with the Landick family. Edward Bushell the elder, a gentleman of Bath, died in 1701. From his will we learn that he had sons named Edward and John, the latter having a son of his own named Richard. He also had daughters (presumably at this stage unmarried, since they shared their father’s surname) with the names Ann and Frances. Intriguingly, Edward also had a daughter named Elizabeth Landick. He mentions two cousins: Frances and Thomas, the latter being the proprietor of the Three Tunns in Bath. In his will Edward Bushell also describes Peter Boulton as his ‘cousin’, but their precise relationship remains unclear. By 1701 Peter had been married to Posthuma Landick for two years, so it’s possible that this was his sole connection to Edward: perhaps Posthuma was a sister or cousin of the member of the Landick family who married Elizabeth Bushell, Edward’s daughter? Or perhaps Edward Bushell was already linked to Peter Boulton through the latter’s first wife, another Elizabeth Bushell? Some credence is given to the latter suggestion by another Bushell will made a few years earlier. In 1696 Samuel Bushell of Bath had made his will. He refers to his wife, yet another Elizabeth Bushell, but there is no mention of any children, so perhaps Samuel was still quite a young man when he died. However, he does bequeath money to ‘my cosen Alice Boulton daughter of my brother-in-law Peter Boulton’. Since this will was made three years before Peter Boulton married Posthuma Landick, it must mean that Samuel was the brother of Peter’s first wife Elizabeth Bushell, thus confirming the connection between the Bushells of Fladbury and those of Bath. The will is also confirmation that Peter and Elizabeth Boulton’s daughter Alice was still alive in 1696, but that her sister Elizabeth, mentioned with her in a London record of the previous year, had probably died, since she is not mentioned in the will. I suspect that the absence of any reference to Peter’s wife, and Samuel’s sister, Elizabeth means that she too had died by this date. Unfortunately, Samuel Bushell doesn’t mention any siblings or cousins in his will, so his relationship to Edward Bushell the elder is unclear. And of course Edward’s will doesn’t refer to Samuel, since he had been dead for five years when it was written. Perhaps Samuel was a brother or even a cousin of Edward’s, like the Thomas Bushell mentioned in the latter’s will? This was probably the Thomas Bushell who made his own will in 1721. The will mentions Thomas’ daughters Elizabeth and Mary, his nieces Eleanor and Mary Ford, and his sister Frances Purlewent. Perhaps the latter was the wife of Samuel Purlewent who witnessed Peter Boulton’s will in 1743 and who would in 1755, four years before his death, be a party to a case in Chancery involving Edward Bushell Collibee and Peter Boulton’s granddaughter Mary.

The Four Bath Worthies (Anonymous, c. 1735) via buildingofbathcollection.org.uk

For our purposes, the most interesting aspect of the will is that Thomas Bushell leaves one hundred pounds to Eleanor ‘Gospright’ daughter of Peter Boulton of London, gunsmith. I already knew that a daughter of Peter Boulton’s had married Captain Richard Gosfreight, but I had concluded that it must be Alice, since she and Elizabeth were the only two Boulton daughters I knew of. It now appears that there was at least a third Boulton daughter, and it seems likely that she was the product of Peter’s second marriage, to Posthuma Landick. It’s also interesting to learn that, at late as 1721, Peter Boulton was still ‘of London’, despite his connection by marriage with the Bushells and the Landicks of Bath. That Peter Boulton’s daughter Alice did not marry Richard Gosfreight, and perhaps even remained unmarried, is confirmed by a reference in the will of Edward Bushell the younger, who died in 1724. Edward’s will makes a bequest to Alice Boulton, daughter of Peter Boulton. This will is also useful for throwing light on the connection between the Bushell and Collibee families. Edward mentions two of his sisters – Elizabeth Landick and Ann Collibee, the latter obviously having married since her father made his will 1701. The ‘probatum’ following the will again refers to these two sisters, the former said to be a widow and the latter the wife of William Collibee. Ann Collibee (née Bushell?) made her will in 1729. The first person she mentions is her cousin Mr Peter Boulton. We also discover that Edward Bushell Collibee was her son – his middle name making sense if she was, indeed, born a Bushell. We know from other sources that Edward Bushell Collibee’s father William was, like him, an apothecary and mayor of Bath. William Collibee was born in 1672 and died in 1728; he was mayor in 1719/20. Edward Bushell Collibee was born in about 1707 and was mayor on a number of occasions between the 1750s and 1780s; he died in 1795. The will of John Bushell, brother of Ann and of Edward the younger, who died in 1703, just two years after his father Edward Bushell the elder, mentions his wife Anne, his son Richard, his brother Edward and his sisters Frances Bushell and Elizabeth Landick. John also makes reference to his brother-in-law William Collibee and to his nephew George Collibee, son of his sister-in law Mary Collibee. She was almost certainly the Mary Collibee who made her own will in 1725, in which she mentions a daughter named Ann and sons Richard, Benjamin, George, Anthony and William. Mary also refers to her sister Anne Bushell, a widow. If this was the widow of John Bushell, does it actually mean sister-in-law, or was John’s wife born a Collibee, thus creating a double connection between the two families? The will of Mary Collibee’s son Richard Collibee, who died in 1740, mentions his brothers George and Benjamin Collibee and his sister Ann Collibee. He also refers to his nephew Edward Bushell Collibee, to his aunt Mrs Ann Bushell (John Bushell’s widow?) and to his cousin Richard Bushell, ‘gentleman deceased’. This complicates the emerging Bushell-Collibee family tree still further. It will take further research to untangle the web of relationships between the two families, and to determine the precise nature of their connection with Peter Boulton and his first and second wives. The history of the Bushell, Collibee and Boulton families in the early eighteenth century is interesting in its own right, and to my knowledge it hasn’t been explored or written about before. However, I also remain hopeful that at some stage it will throw light on the origins of my Forrest ancestors, with whom these families were intimately connected.

The Worcestershire connection

I’ve been taking a break from researching my Sussex Byne ancestors, and having another look at the Forrest family. My 8 x great grandfather John Byne (1651 – 1689), who was the son of Magnus Byne (1615 – 1671), rector of Clayton-cum-Keymer in Sussex, moved to London as a young man and worked as a stationer at Tower Hill. It was there, in about 1675, that he met and married Alice Forrest, the daughter of haberdasher Thomas Forrest and his wife Anne.

The Vale of Evesham, Worcestershire (via geograph.org.uk)

Last year I spent some time exploring the will of Alice Byne née Forrest, who died in 1738, and also the will of William Forrest of Badsey, near Evesham in Worcestershire, who died in 1700. William’s will had bequeathed ‘to my said cozen Alice Bine All my Lands Messuages Tenements and Hereditaments in Badsey’, property which is also mentioned in Alice’s own will. From these wills, and from other evidence, I concluded that William Forrest was almost certainly the brother of Alice’s father Thomas, and therefore her uncle, rather than her ‘cozen’ (a term that, as we have seen in many other instances, was used at this period to describe a variety of family relationships). I also came to the conclusion that the Forrest family had its roots in Worcestershire, and that my 9 x great grandfather Thomas Forrest was probably born there and moved to London as a young man (I’m almost certain that he’s the Thomas Forrest who married Anne Burrowes at St Bartholomew the Great in June 1650). In other words, the experience of the Forrest family of Worcestershire seems to have mirrored that of the Bynes of Sussex: they too were a family of yeoman farmers in the shires, one or more of whose members came to London to be apprenticed to a trade, while retaining a foothold in their county of origin.

William Forrest’s will enabled me to discover the connection between the Forrests and another family with one foot in London and another in Worcestershire: the Boultons, a number of whom would become prominent shipbuilders and members of the East India Company. Briefly, it seems that another Alice Forrest, the sister of William (and probably of my 9 x great grandfather Thomas), married a member of the Boulton family, almost certainly named William, and that they lived in the parish of All Hallows, Barking, in the City of London. William was perhaps a merchant and probably made the same kind of move from his Worcestershire home as did his brother-in-law Thomas Forrest. William and Alice Boulton had a number of children, including Captain Richard Boulton the elder, who died in 1737; Major Peter Boulton, a gunsmith, who retired to Bath and died in 1743; William Boulton junior, whose son Captain Richard Boulton the younger worked for the East India Company and retired to Perdiswell near Worcester, dying there in 1745; Elizabeth Boulton who married naval commissioner Martin Markland; Mary Boulton who married a Mr. Lewes; and another daughter, name unknown, who married Thomas Saunders of Moor, near Fladbury in Worcestershire. Thomas Saunders’ daughter Hester Saunders married Thomas Crabb and had two sons, Henry and Richard, who took the additional surname Boulton on inheriting property from Richard Boulton junior; both of them were leading lights in the East India Company and Henry served as Member of Parliament for Worcester. Another Saunders daughter, Grace, married Jersey-born salter James Jemblin: their eldest son John was described as ‘of Evesham’ in the 1745 will of his cousin, Richard Boulton the younger.

Church of All Hallows Barking, London

Researching the interrelated Forrest, Boulton and Saunders families of Worcestershire has often proved difficult, and at times I’ve longed for an equivalent of Walter Renshaw’s history of the Bynes of Sussex: that’s to say, an overview written by somebody who has been able to inspect the parish and other records ‘on the ground’. In the absence of that, I’ve had to search long and hard online for the odd reference to individuals who may or may not have been members of these connected families. However, returning to this branch of my family tree in the past week or so, I’ve succeeded in discovering some new records that may help to fill in the gaps in our knowledge of these families.

Firstly, I think I’ve found some new information about the Saunders family. William Forrest’s will of 1699 bequeaths ‘to William Grace and Hester children of Mr Thomas Saunders of Moore twenty shillings apiece’. We know that Hester Saunders of All Hallows Barking married Thomas Crabb in 1708, and they were the parents of Henry and Richard Crabb who are described as nephews (but were probably his great nephews) in the will of Captain Richard Boulton the elder. There is a reference in the National Archives to Thomas Saunders a ‘gent’ of Moor, whose property was included in a return of ‘papists’ and non jurors’ estates’ drawn up after the Jacobite rising of 1715. Moor is a small hamlet, often mentioned in tandem with its neighbouring settltment Hill (as in ‘Hill and Moor’) close to Fladbury, a village on the banks of the River Avon about five miles north-west of Evesham (Badsey is about three miles to the east of the town). It lies opposite the village of Cropthorne.

Via The Genealogist I managed to find a record of the baptism of Thomas Saunders of Moor, in the parish of Fladbury, on 10^th March 1653. Apparently his father’s name was John. I then came across a baptismal record for Hesther Saunders, daughter of Thomas Saunders of Moor, also at Fladbury, on 1^st March 1688. About four years previously, on 23^rd December 1684, Thomas’ son William had been christened. This would fit with the names in William Forrest’s will, though I’ve yet to find a record of Grace Saunders’ birth or baptism. The record of William Saunders’ baptism notes that his mother’s name was Margaret. As mentioned above, I believe that Thomas Saunders married a daughter of William and Alice Bolton née Forrest. So was her first name Margaret?

Just before the bequest to the Saunders children in William Forrest’s will, there is this sentence: ‘To Richard and Ann sonne and daughter of Richard Haines of Charleton and Jane his wife five pounds apeece’. Also via The Genealogist, I’ve discovered baptismal records for Richard and Ann Haines, the children of another Richard Haines, in 1691 and 1692 respectively, in the parish of Cropthorne, about a mile from the village of Charlton.

But perhaps most significantly, using Family Search I’ve managed to locate a Forrest family living in the Fladbury area in the early seventeenth century. For example, George Forrest had a son named William baptised there on 27^th February 1626 and a daughter Alisia christened on 25^th October 1629. Could this be William Forrest, later of Badsey, and his sister Alice who married William Boulton? Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to discover whether George Forrest had a son named Thomas, though I did find a Thomas born to a Richard Forrest (perhaps George’s brother?) in Fladbury in 1623. All of these dates fit with what we know about the lives of William, Alice and Thomas Forrest.

Fladbury church and mill (via bbc.co.uk/history/domesday)

I also found out that George Forrest had married Ann Horniblow in Fladbury on 10^th August 1625. The following document, dated 1608, from the National Archives, mentions a Thomas Horniblow, as well as Robert, William and Thomas Forest ‘all of Hill in Fladbury, husbandmen’, though these are probably from an earlier generation of the Forest family:

Counterpart of a deed to declare the uses of a fine between Thomas Throckmorton of Coughton, Warws. esq. pl. and John Darby of Fladbury, yeoman, John Marshall of Bishampton, husbandman, Robert Forrest and William Forrest, his son, John Heynes, Thomas Hornyblowe, Richard Horne and Thomas Forrest, all of Hill in Fladbury, husbandmen, of a messuage and lands in Bishampton, in the tenure of John Marshall, a messuage in Hill and lands, some called Lockyers, in Hill and Moor in Fladbury, in the tenure of Robert Forrest, lands (some described) in Hill in Fladbury, in the tenure of John Darby, a messuage in Hill and lands in Hill and Moor in Fladbury, in the tenure of John Heynes, a messuage in Hill and lands in Hill and Moor in Fladbury, in the tenure of Thomas Hornyblowe, a messuage in Hill and lands in Hill and Moor in Fladbury, in the tenure of Richard Horne, and a messuage in Hill called Warrantes and lands in Hill and Moor in Fladbury, in the tenure of Thomas Forrest. To hold to the use of the respective tenants of each of the said properties.

The Thomas Throckmorton mentioned in this record was a member of a prominent Worcestershire family with roots in the village of Throckmorton five miles north-west of Evesham. Throckmorton was a staunch Catholic who had suffered persecution and loss of property during the reign of Elizabeth:

In the time of Sir Robert Throckmorton, and his son and heir Thomas, Coughton became a centre for Catholic recusants. The Tower Room of Coughton Court with its panoramic view for monitoring any approach to the house made it an ideal location for the secret celebration of the Mass, and there was also an ingenious double hiding place built by Nicholas Owen in one of the turrets for the priests in the event of a raid. The Throckmortons not only provided a relatively safe place for people to worship; they also assisted in the underground movements of the priests and established colleges abroad for training English clergy. They were a crucial part of the network of families that enabled Catholicism to remain alive throughout the Reformation.

As for William Forest of Badsey, possible brother of my 9 x great grandfather Thomas Forrest, I’ve found two contemporary documents that mention him. The first is undated:

Henry Chauntrell v. Sheldon Stephens (an infant), by Thos. Tolley his guardian, John Tolley and his wife Mary, William Forrest: Messuage and yard land (lately belonging to Cox Stephens, defendant’s late father), lying in Wyer Piddle, and elsewhere, in the parish of Fladbury (Worcester), and touching the sale of the lands in Badsey belonging to “Chrisogon,” the wife of said Cox Stephens, &c., &c.: Worcester

Secondly, in 1685 William was a witness to the will of Augustine Jarrett of Badsey. One of the other witnesses was Charles Nixon, whom William would appoint as one of the overseers of his own will nine years later. Nixon was the vicar of Badsey from 1677 to 1705.

This confirms that William Forrest was a longstanding (and probably unmarried) Worcestershire resident and did not migrate to London like his brother Thomas and his sister Alice who married William Boulton. It also suggests that the Forrest and Saunders families, and perhaps the Boultons (though their Worcestershire roots are proving more elusive) had their origins in a cluster of villages strung along the River Avon, between Evesham and Pershore.

I’ve also discovered some new records for Major Peter Boulton, the London gunsmith who was one of the sons of William Boulton and Alice Boulton née Forrest. When he died in 1743, Peter Boulton was living in Bath and was married to a woman named Posthuma. However, until this week I’d been unable to find any record of this marriage. Instead, I had located the record of what looked like an earlier marriage, on 26^th June 1691 at St James, Westminster, between Peter Boulton of All Saints (i.e. All Hallows) Barking, London, and Elizabeth Bushell of Flatbury (i.e. Fladbury), Worcestershire. It was his bride’s Fladbury connection, in addition to the mention of All Hallows Barking, that made me think this was probably ‘our’ Peter Boulton. Reflecting on this first marriage, I recalled that Peter Boulton’s great niece, Elizabeth Jemblin (the daughter of his niece Grace Jemblin nee Saunders) would marry a man named Edward Bushell Collibee, an apothecary, alderman and sometime mayor of Bath. The Bushells, like the Collibees, seem to have provided a number of Bath’s leading citizens and to be one of the city’s leading families. Was there perhaps a connection between the Bushells of Bath and the Bushells of Fladbury in Worcestershire, some seventy-five miles away? And might this link help to explain how Peter Boulton, a London gun maker whose family originated in Worcestershire, came to be living in Bath in the first place? Did he inherit property there via his first wife Elizabeth Bushell, She was apparently about 21 years old when they married, which means she was born in about 1670. I’ve found records for at least two Elizabeth Bushells born in the Fladbury area, but neither is a close match in terms of chronology.

Bath in the 18th century

My researches in the London Metropolitan Archives last summer unearthed evidence of a Peter and Elizabeth Boulton living in the parish of All Hallows Barking in 1695, with their two daughters Alice and Elizabeth (it was one of these daughters, probably Alice, who would marry Captain Richard Gosfreight in about 1710). I had assumed that Peter’s wife Elizabeth must have died some time around 1700, but I’ve now found a record of his marriage to his second wife, Posthuma, which took place on 31^st December 1699, so Elizabeth Boulton née Bushell must have died before that date, perhaps in childbirth. This second marriage took place at Bath Abbey and we learn that Posthuma’s maiden name was Landick. A child with that name (mistranscribed in the online record as ‘Fostuma’) was christened at Bath Abbey on 23^rd January 1676, meaning that she was twenty-three years old when she married Peter Boulton. Posthuma was the daughter of David Landick ‘late deceased’ and his wife Elizabeth. On 24^th November 1687 Mrs Elizabeth Landick, presumably Posthuma’s widowed mother, married Robert Hayward, also at Bath Abbey.

The fact that Peter Boulton’s second wife Posthuma was from Bath strengthens my theory that he already owned property there as a result of his first marriage to Elizabeth Bushell. We know that Peter continued to live in the parish of All Hallows Barking after his marriage to Posthuma, because his sons Edward and Peter were born in there in 1703 and 1709 respectively. However, Peter and Posthuma had obviously retired to Bath and regarded it as their main address by the time Peter made his will in 1741.

These new discoveries open up new lines of enquiry that may lead, perhaps indirectly, to identifying more precisely the Worcestershire origins of my Forrest ancestors.

More information about William Wane (died 1626)

Yesterday I noted that William Wane, my 10 x great grandfather, was ordained in 1598 in Chichester, when Lancelot Andrewes, the noted scholar and mentor of the poet George Herbert, was bishop. I’ve been trying to find out more about William, in the hope of extending this particular branch of my maternal family tree a little further back in time.

South Downs near Clayton, Sussex

Firstly, though, a reminder of my connection to William Wane. He was the father of Anne Wane (1611 – 1661), whose third husband was Magnus Byne (1615 – 1671) – one of William’s successors as rector of Clayton-cum-Keymer in Sussex. Magnus and Anne Byne were my 9 x great grandparents: their son John (1651 – 1689), a London stationer, and his wife Alice Forrest (died 1738) were my 8 x great grandparents.

I owe my discovery of William Wane’s existence to Walter Charles Renshaw’s 1913 publication, Searches into the History of the Family Byne or Bine of Sussex, which has also been my source for much of the information about this branch of my family tree. Citing a Deposition Book of 1607/8, Renshaw claims that William Wane was born in 1561 in Westerham, Kent. However, this would mean that he was 37 when he was ordained in 1598, which seems rather old, given that ordination usually followed soon after graduation from Oxford or Cambridge. However, I’ve now found a reference in the International Genealogical Index to the licence for William’s marriage to Joan Kemp, which was registered at Lewes and dated 9^th December 1601. The licence describes Joan as being of Albourne, Sussex (five miles or so north-west of Clayton), and as having been born in about 1580, which means that she was 21 years old when she married. As for William, he is said to be of Clayton, Sussex, and to have been born in about 1576, which would make him 25 at the time of his marriage, a much more believable age.

St Bartholomew’s church, Albourne, Sussex

According to Renshaw, William Wane’s wife Joan was the widow of Thomas Kempe of Albourne, a yeoman. Thomas’ will is dated 24^th September 1601 and was proved on 31^st October in the same year. William Wane was inducted to the rectory of Clayton-cum-Keymer on 1^st January 1601/2, but it’s unclear whether this refers to the year before the death of Thomas Kempe and William’s subsequent marriage to Joan or after those events.

What else do we know about William Wane? We know that his first appointment was as curate in Wivelsfield, about five miles north-east of Clayton. Renshaw also offers the tantalising information that, in 1606 and 1607, William was ‘in trouble in the Court on account of his relations with a woman named Ellenor Poulter’.  Anne, daughter of William and Joan Wayne, was christened at Clayton on 2^nd March 1602/3, so she was probably their first child. William died in 1626, at the age of 50, and was buried at Clayton on 22^nd September.

Wivelsfield church, Sussex

Thomas Kempe’s will of 1601 and William Wane’s will of 1626 are held at the East Sussex Record Office in Lewes, and I am in the process of applying for copies of both. I hope they will shed more light on their lives and families, and enable me to trace William’s and Joan’s lines back further into the sixteenth century.

The Forrests of Aldgate

Thomas Forrest, a citizen and haberdasher who lived at Little Tower Hill and who was buried at the church of St Botolph, Aldgate on 12th January 1679, was my 9 x great grandfather, and my earliest confirmed London ancestor. His daughter Alice, my 8 x great grandmother, married citizen and stationer John Byne, and their daughter Mary Byne and her husband, citizen and goldsmith Joseph Greene, were my 7 x great grandparents.

St Botolph, Aldgate

I’ve been trying to find out more about the origins of Thomas Forrest. What do we know about him with any degree of certainty?  We know that, besides Alice, he also had a son named Thomas, who is mentioned in his will and was in fact appointed co-executor with his mother Anne. However, I’ve yet to find any further records for Thomas Forrest junior.

It seems likely that Anne Forrest’s maiden name was Borrowes or Burroughs, and that she is the person, from the parish of St Andrew, Holborn, who married Thomas Forrest at the church of St Bartholomew the Great on 18^th June 1650. The parish register notes that Thomas was from the parish of St Botolph, Aldersgate, but this might be an error for Aldgate, since all other records place him in the latter parish.

On 27^th April 1652, a child named Thomas, son of Thomas and Anne Forrest of the Minories, was buried at St Botolph, Aldgate. I haven’t yet found christening records for Alice, or for the Thomas junior who survived, but they were probably both born some time in the 1650s. By the time of Thomas senior’s death in 1679, Thomas junior was old enough to be named as an executor, while Alice was already married with at least one child.

I’m fairly certain that Thomas Forrest senior had a brother William who survived him. This is the person who died in Badsey, Worcestershire, in 1700. Although he describes my 8 x great grandmother Alice Byne née Forrest as a ‘cousin’, we know from other documents that she was actually his niece. William’s absence from Thomas’ will of 1678 is something of a problem, but the will only leaves money and property to immediate family and does not mention any Forrest relatives.

In other posts I’ve described at length my theory about the links between the Forrests and the Boulton family of London and Worcestershire. Briefly, I believe that William and Thomas Forrest had a sister named Alice who married a member of the Boulton family – probably named William – and that they had a number of children, including East India Company merchant Richard Boulton and gunsmith Peter Boulton.

The Worcestershire connection initially led me to believe that the Forrests, like the Boultons, had their roots in that county. While that may still turn out to be true, more recently I’ve been exploring the theory that Thomas Forrest was actually born in London. I’ve found evidence of other Forrests living in Aldgate who might be related to him. For example, I’ve discovered a couple named William and Susan Forrest who had children named Thomas and Alice, born around the time when one might expect ‘my’ Thomas Forrest and his sister to have been born. On 14^th January 1626, Alice Forrest, daughter of William, was christened at St Botolph’s church. On 7^th December 1628, William and Susan Forrest had a son named Thomas baptised at the same church, but he died and was buried there nine days later. The same couple buried a daughter named Elizabeth on 10^th September 1630, a daughter named Anne on 21^st March 1631, and another son named Thomas on 9^th April 1632.

It seems likely that if William and Susan Forrest had another son after this, they would also have named him Thomas, though if he were born in 1632, he would have been only eighteen years old in 1650 when I believe ‘my’ Thomas was married. Would this have been too young for a seventeenth-century man to marry? If William and Susan then had another son, there’s a strongly possibility that he would have been named William after his father. And the Alice Forrest who was born in 1626 would certainly have been about the right age to marry (William) Boulton in the 1650s.

All of the parish records for William and Susan Forrest give their address in what looks like an abbreviated form – ‘Esd’ (see below)? Does this stand for East Smithfield?

William’s occupation in these records is also rather difficult to make out, but looks like ‘porter’. I don’t know enough about seventeenth-century occupations to determine what status this job had, but I wonder if the son of a porter would have become a haberdasher, and if his daughter would have married a merchant?

Tower of London and Tower Hill in late 17th century (Johann Spilberg II) (via http://www.gac.culture.gov.uk)

A number of other families with the surname Forrest can be found living in the parish of St Botolph, Aldgate, in the middle of the seventeenth century. I was particularly intrigued by John and Mary Forrest, who lived – like my ancestor Thomas – at Tower Hill. On 18^th June 1665, when living at this address, they had a son named Peter christened at St Botolph’s.  Some seven years earlier, on 5^th December 1658, they had buried a son named Thomas at the same church: their address then had been (what looks like) Bedlam Street.

At this stage, I can’t confirm that any of these Aldgate Forrests were related to my ancestor Thomas, but their presence in the same area, at around the same time, perhaps strengthens the evidence for ‘my’ Forrests having their roots in London.