Ann Sproxton (1760 - 1838)

52 Ancestor Challenge - Challenge 4

Blake, King, Coleman, Pearce, Farmer, unknown, Lambden, Sarah (unknown), Knight, Ellis, Knight, Vincent,  Butt, Durnford, Arnold, Molton, Cotterel, Bartlett, Alderman, Ann (unknown), Sherwood, unknown, Habberfield, Collings, Rawlings, Tanner, Dove, Morgan, Lywood, Canham, unknown, Peck, Pincombe, Charley, Rowcliffe, Pearse, Rew, Moggridge, Siderfin, Kent, Gray, Hilton, Cobb, Sproxton, Routledge, Tweddle, Routledge, Routledge, (unknown) Buller, unknown, Beard, Hemsley, Welch, Brockhouse, Cheatle, Woodcock, unknown Taylor, unknown, Harborne, Lewis, Roberts, Croxall, Lawley, unknown

I have now reached the fourth week of the 52 Ancestor Challenge and still reporting in a timely fashion. My lecture now complete, my back very much on the mend, I can now settle back into my daily research pattern with one exception. Sitting is apparently the new smoking so I will get up every thirty minutes or so and do some exercise. Being a bit of an exercise fanatic anyway, that is not a problem! But coming up with so many exercise routines will be an interesting challenge in itself.

This week Ann Sproxton is my 4x great grandmother as are all the individuals in this 52 Ancestor Challenge. Ann was baptized 14 Sep 1760 at Great Driffield, East Riding of Yorkshire. The knowledge of Ann goes back to our first time at Salt Lake City Family History Library and indeed our only time there thus far. The marriage registration for John Cobb and Ann Sproxton is dated 24 Nov 1782 at Lund, East Riding of Yorkshire and the priest obligingly wrote that Ann was born at Great Driffield and John born at Kilnwick (East Riding of Yorkshire).  I attach an image of their marriage registration:

 

Interestingly enough the x is written in such a way that it looks like a w and transcriptions of this marriage registration have read John Cobb and Ann Sprowston. This is the only Sprowston that I have ever found and it wasn't util I saw this marriage registration and realized that it read Sproxton that I was able to move back in time with Ann. The witnesses are John Wilson and Benjamin Cobb. Benjamin is likely the brother of John Cobb. 

Going to the Great Driffield parish registers which I could readily do at the FHL in Salt Lake City I found the baptism of Ann Sproxton 14 Sep 1760 and the daughter of Richard Sproxton and Ann Harland. Richard and Ann had been married 24 Dec 1753 at Great Driffield. They baptized four children at Great Driffield:

Daniel baptized 12 Mar 1754 (and about whom I know nothing more at the moment)
Richard baptized 10 Oct 1756 (married Frances Dent 12 Apr 1790 at Tunstall, ERY and they have three children Richard 1791, Francis 1794, and Ann 1797)
Ann baptized 14 Sep 1760
 Dyna baptized 22 Jun 1765

Richard was buried 3 May 1770 at Great Driffield and Ann 17 May 1797 was buried at Great Driffield. I continued following both lines back in the registers at the Family History Library and I will show this information at the bottom of the post.

Ann Sproxton and John Cobb baptized three children at Lund:

Elizabeth 24 Aug 1783 (my ancestor)
Ann 18 Mar 1791
John 18 Jan 1793

I have not been able to learn anything to date about Ann and John but will take a few moments now to look them up in Find My Past as I have not examined this family in a few years.

However, Elizabeth married Robert Gray 13 Jan 1806 at Lund and more on the Gray family another day but they baptized 9 children at Etton. Three of these children emigrated to Canada and one of them, Robert junior, is my 2x great grandfather and my second emigrant ancestor to come to Canada from England. He married a daughter of the first emigrants (and she herself was also an emigrant). One of their daughters, Grace Gray, was my first Canadian born ancestor. This is a very thin line as her son was my second Canadian born ancestor and my mother was my third Canadian born ancestor.

Back to John Cobb and Ann Sproxton and especially Ann. Ann was buried 21 May 1838 at Lund near Beverley (she outlived her daughter Elizabeth by 7 years and also lived long enough to see my ancestor Robert and his brother William depart for Canada around 1832). Realizing that I feel even more compelled to see about the other two children Ann and John siblings of Elizabeth.

This partial map of the East Riding of Yorkshire lets you see the location of the various parishes mentioned above and can be seen on the Genuki webpages:

http://www.genuki.org.uk/big/eng/YKS/Misc/Maps/ERYParishes.gif

I know from the Land Records that John Cobb farmed and paid rent of  5.5 pence to the Parish Church at Lund. His brother Benjamin had an ale house. John is in the land records into the 1830s at Lund although by 1837 the rent is paid for the late John Cobb perhaps by his wife as she is still alive at this time and this is of course Ann (Sproxton) Cobb.

In the burials for Lund, I found John son of John Cobb, labourer, buried 16 Jan 1803. Ann is  baptised as the daughter of John Cobb, Yeoman, 18 Mar 1791. There are a number of marriages for an Ann Cobb but difficult to determine if one of them is this Ann.

 Ahnentafel Chart for Ann Sproxton (abbreviated):
1 Ann Sproxton (1760-1838)

2 Richard Sproxton (1721-1770)
3 Ann Harland (1731-1797)

4 Richard Sproxton (1691-1768)
5 Dorothy English (1692-1772)
6 Timothy Harland (1674-1776)
7 Ann Wilkinson (-1761)

8 Richard Sproxton (1663-1774)
9 Margaret Garrit/Garratt (-1720)
10
11
12  John Harland
13
14
15

16 John Sproxton (c1630-1714)
17 Ann Simpson (-1708)
18
.....

33 John Sproxton (-1663)
34 Isobel (-1650)


Ann is my 4x great grandmother:

1. Elizabeth BLAKE
2. Helen Louise PINCOMBE (b 18 Oct 1916) - Westminster Township Middlesex County Ontario Canada
3. John Routledge PINCOMBE (b 10 Sep 1872)- Lobo Township Middlesex County Ontario Canada
4. Grace GRAY (b 22 Mar 1839) - London Township Middlesex County Ontario Canada
5. Robert GRAY (b 3 Nov 1810) - Etton Yorkshire England
6. Elizabeth COBB (b 24 Aug 1783) - Lund near Beverley Yorkshire England
7. Ann SPROXTON (b 14 Sep 1760) - Great Driffield Yorkshire England
8. Richard SPROXTON (b 10 Oct 1721) - Hutton Cranswick Yorkshire England
9. Richard SPROXTON (b 2 Oct 1691) - Hutton Cranswick Yorkshire England
10. Richard SPROXTON (b 2 Aug 1663) - Hutton Cranswick Yorkshire England
11. John SPROXTON
12. John SPROXTON (d 21 Jul 1663) - Hutton Cranswick Yorkshire England


Prior to 1663 I do not have any information on this Sproxton family. In the records at Kew C 135/104/7 there is mention of a Post Mortem for William Sproxton or de Sproxton Yorkshire and 23 Edw III is 25 Jan 1349 to 24 Jan 1350. Three hundred years earlier there was a Sproxton in Yorkshire so all rather interesting but is this the same family? There was also a Sproxton Leicestershire which occurs in the records and could this family have taken their name from that place. A mystery and perhaps next time at Salt Lake City will have a look.

Also in the reign of Edward I, Robert de Sproxton Post Mortem C 133/88/3.

According to the National Archives there are 4 records 1000-1099, 9 records 1200-1299 and 11 records 1300-1399. With the earliest records being in the Domesday Book. Sprostune being in North Yorkshire in the Domesday Book.

Hearth Tax - Roehampton University project

The Hearth Tax project at the Roehampton University has now added East Yorkshire information. This is an incredible resource for looking at East Yorkshire Riding in 1672. The Hearth Tax is a listing of householders in England of the 1660s and 1670s and provides an insight into the status of individuals (i.e. their property).

http://www.hearthtax.org.uk/

All of my East Yorkshire Riding people can be found in the hundred / wapentake of Harthill Bainton Beacon and specifically the Constabularies / Wards of Great Driffield and Little Driffield, Etton, Hutton Cranswick, Holme on the Wolds, Cherry Burton, Lund near Beverley, Kilnwick, Skerne, Watton, and Barmby on the Moor.

The lists also reveal to me that some of my surnames were indeed somewhat unique with only a couple of members listed for each particular surname. In particular Sproxton, Beilby, English, and Garratt belong to this group. My other surnames of Grey/Gray, Cobb, Harland, Wilkinson, Hilton, Constable, and Stephenson are also listed although in greater numbers.

I have found a Robert English at Barmby on the Moor who may be my ancient ancestor. Dorothy English married Richard Sproxton 15 Nov 1716 at Hutton Cranswick. Her parentage is unknown to me.

Presentation

I spent part of yesterday working on my presentation at BIFHSGO. It will be my last presentation as I find it simply takes too much time and energy to do them. I end up being sleepless towards the end of the time before I give it and that leaves me little energy for anything else. This one is on DNA Case Studies. I wrote it in early July so it has been complete for quite some time. I need to prepare my handout and send it in to be reproduced. It will likely be two pages back to back or 24 slides. I usually just include the slides that have general information on them.

We canned pickled beets yesterday and froze two large bags of tomatoes. We will likely do another couple of bags of tomatoes to use this winter. Our garden is slowly gearing down and the weather has turned definitely fall like. We had a bicycle ride yesterday as well - 12.3 km. I am now about halfway between Calgary and Edmonton on my virtual trip across Canada (I started in Victoria a year ago July just past). I was ill for a while last year so did not accomplish a great deal. I hope to reach Edmonton by mid-September. I have no idea how long it will take me to cross Canada - possibly 5 or 6 years!

I had one response to my request for Hartland information but the reply had Hartland ancestors in the late 1800s and early 1900s so does not link readily to my Hartlands in the mid 1700s! I am more or less ready to go back to the FHL to look at the film once again. This time I will film 1612 to 1700 or thereabouts looking for Harland, Wilkinson and Gray. The Gray family is found in many of the parishes in this area. The knack is sorting them out I guess - there is a large Gray family at Great Driffield.

Today I meant to work on the Hinxman will as I want to send off a draft to the individual that I am working with on this family line. I sent another 5 years of Cherry Burton to the Gray researcher. I do not see that we have common ancestry but one never knows what might surface as you work together. However, the day has passed me by and I haven't accomplished anything on the Hinxman will.

However, we went to Christ Church Cathedral today for the 10:30 a.m. service. I really have been wanting to go back as I used to go to Church every Sunday. Perhaps we will get there more often now. Then a bicycle ride 12.6 km and the day soon passed.

Tomorrow I will get back to genealogy!

Great Driffield

I spent the morning looking at the Great Driffield parish registers at the Family History Centre. Most of my names there are from my Gray line (my great grandmother Grace Gray's ancestors). The Gray family was from the East Riding of Yorkshire and from the parishes of Lund, Hutton Cranswick, Great Driffield, Cherry Burton, Holme on the Wolds, Etton and Kilnwick on the Wolds. This group of parishes all lie together about 15 miles from the North Sea in a parallel fashion. I have also looked at the parishes of Skerne and Watton which are part of this group and have not yet looked at Lockington and South Dalton mostly because I do not have even one entry thus far from those two parishes.

The Great Driffield parish registers go back to 1556 and will be very interesting if I find my Harland and Wilkinson (and possibly other lines) lines in this parish back that far. I photographed from the beginning of the registers to 1612 (baptisms, marriages and burials). I will have a look at them to see the names that are found in these early registers - I did note that there are several Gray families and I need to locate my Gray family prior to 1708 at Cherry Burton. My husband photographed the early Hutton Cranswick registers complete from 1657 (when they begin) up to 1747. I had not checked for my Gray family there and must do so now given the information that I learned on the East Yorkshire Listserv.

In all I took 174 images and my husband took 403. I will have a busy time going through all of those images. We are both waiting for one more film from Salt Lake City - Warrin for my husband (in Germany) and St Mary Bourne (Hampshire UK) for me. We do not expect them to arrive for another couple of weeks. I will see how much I go through tomorrow on my images and then decide whether I will go to the FHS Friday or next Monday. I found all the baptisms, marriages and burials I was looking for including Timothy and Ann Harland, Richard and Ann Sproxton burials. I also photographed a few Harland burials and a few Wilkinson burials that looked interesting.

A cursory glance such as I was using today did not reveal if my Harland and Wilkinson families were of the parish. Indeed the marriage between Timothy Harland and Ann Wilkinson was almost illegible. I am going to try to lighten that image to see if I am able to read the text. Unfortunately it is still quite illegible. I am thinking that the IGI entry must be from the Bishops Transcripts.

Tomorrow I will continue reviewing the images of Great Driffield as I want to go back and takes images of 1612 to 1720 of the baptisms, marriages and burials.

Back to Work

Three days pretty much lost to genealogy - nothing done at all! However, the days were most interesting and very family oriented which is not a usual thing with us in that our children are grown adults with their own lives. We enjoy our time with our children but also enjoy our time on our own probably because we were married for eight years before children and my mind goes back to those days of wild flower searching, birding, canoeing and hiking remembering them fondly. Our children always have first priority on our time but the rest of the time is all ours and mostly spent on genealogy. Why spend it on genealogy? Mostly because of this incredible desire borne of my trip to England in 2001 to understand my ancestral past.

I never experienced any "need to know" before 2001 and was quite content to let my various cousins write up the different lines. But now I would like to fit their work altogether along with my work and see where it takes me back in time. In the back of my mind I remember what my Grandfather told me about his Blake family (and his Knight family as he knew them quite well considering the distance apart and the dates involved) and I remember what my Grandmother said about her family which she mentioned more at the end of her life then when I was young.

I can remember after my grandfather died when I was eight years old that my grandmother said I didn't really love her until my grandfather died. He had lived with us until the last year or so and was a part of my daily life whereas my grandmother lived about a 20 minute bicycle ride away and I was too young to visit her. I can remember the first time I biked to her house. I didn't tell anyone I was going that far and it was just kind of a spontaneous decision. I knew that I had to travel down Windsor Avenue and cross over Wortley to get to her house but I was a bit lost and then I remembered the large Roman Catholic Church that was just down the street from her house and I was soon at 82 Dutchess Avenue.

The last time we were in London I went to look at her house and was shocked to see the overgrown weeds and the house looking much the worse for wear. It was immaculate when I was a child. She would be sad to see her wonderful garden all gone to weeds. But I digress. From the time I was turning nine I used to bike regularly to my grandmother's house and she would tell me stories at first about my grandfather (he had died when my mother was just eight years old) and then about my Canadian ancestors - little things that she knew. Then we talked about her English ancestors and some days she would say a lot and some days not a great deal. She was orphaned at 14 years when her father died and her mother had died when she was 11. The children were scooped up and put into Marston Green Cottage Homes (perhaps because her father was in the military or maybe just everyone was - I am unclear on that point). They were well taken care of and eventually the decision was made (I suspect that it was a mutual one on the part of the four children that were in the care of the Birmingham Union) that the four siblings of my grandmother would go to Canada.

My grandmother was by then working as a dressmaker having completed her apprenticeship as such and living with her Aunt Kate. She had an offer to stay with her father's three sisters who were by then living together (all widows) but decided to go to Canada since her siblings would all be there. Because one of my great aunts was too old to be placed my grandmother took charge of her in Canada and they lived together. It is a very long story that I must recite another time for my blog record but she would talk about that initially and then gradually she talked about her parents as she remembered them and their parents. She was vague on anything before that other than that her maternal grandfather and his ancestors were all shoemakers. The name Taylor and being a shoemaker was not an easy lookup in Birmingham but I have played away at that the last couple of years and once I find the marriage registration for Edwin Denner Buller and Ellen Taylor I will be able to prove the line that I obtained using family lore.

Today looks to be a sunny one here and perhaps less humid. The last two weeks have been warm with high humidity. Since this has been our first warm spell of the summer one doesn't like to complain at the oppressive humidity and it simply does not compare to real humidity that you find on Long Island!

I need to sit back a bit and think about what I am going to work on today. I have a number of need to do items but especially I need to be prepared to look at Great Driffield Parish Registers as they are now in at the Family History Centre. I am quite excited to have this film as it should help me with my Harland family there. Ann Harland married Richard Sproxton (of Hutton Cranswick) at Great Driffield 24 Dec 1753. Ann Harland was perhaps baptized 1 August 1731 at Great Driffield. She was the only Ann Harland baptized in a reasonable time frame and the daughter of Timothy Harland and Ann Wilkinson. Timothy and Ann had married at Great Driffield 24 Jun 1723. That much I learned at Salt Lake City but I did not pursue it further back when we were there as I was being firm not to go back further than 5x great grandparents in order to accomplish all of my goals. They were actually my 6x great grandparents so I exceeded the goal just that amount! Now I can have a look at the register and see if I can learn anything about the Harland and Wilkinson families. I will also look forward as the Sproxton family continued at Great Driffield for several generations.

Tomorrow we are going to make our Fruit Chili Sauce - 3 hours of boiling down all the vegetables fruit and we make about six jars at a time. We will do two lots. Later in the week I hope to get back to genealogy and will have a look at my Great Driffield parish register film at the Family History Centre. I will be looking at the Sproxton, Harland and Wilkinson families. I am back quite a ways now with these lines (5 x and 6x great grandparents). I hope to explore back to the beginning of this Parish Register. I am most fortunate in that it begins in 1566 so will be able to pursue these lines back 150 years if they were at Great Driffield. Of course Sproxton was not but Harland and Wilkinson may have been.

Hinxman Wills - 15 August 2009

I tackled the most difficult of the Hinxman wills that I received to transcribe first. It is certainly a challenge although it is helpful that he is quite repetitive in his bequests to his children. I believe I have all the children now and this was a large family: William (eldest son it would appear), Joseph, Christopher and John are the sons and Elizabeth, Jane, Joane, and Joyes are the daughters. Kinsman/kinswoman are Andrew Henxman and Joane Hinxman and possibly Edward Henxman. A number of friends are listed as well. William appears to be fairly comfortable as he has a lot of household possessions. None of his children appear to be married. Very little money is mentioned nor property. It is more than 59 lines in length. I have done a first run through of page 1 and have text in the first 32 lines. It will likely be slow going but I shall send it off to a fellow researcher towards the end of the week as a rough draft.

I will leave the will for a while now and continue entering in my Sproxton data in case the next films come in more quickly than anticipated. I await Great Driffield and St Mary Bourne. The St Mary Bourne will be an easy read (I think!) because it is a typewritten transcription of the register. I shall extract all of the Lambden entries back as far as they go in the document. That way I will have it at hand in case Nathanael is actually a descendant of this Lambden family that quite early arrives in the St Mary Bourne area possibly from Berkshire where the Lambden family is most commonly found in the 1500s and early 1600s. The Great Driffield will be quite exciting when it arrives as it will have information on the Harland family. Ann Harland (my 5x great grandmother) married Richard Sproxton 24 Jun 1753 at Great Driffield. She was the youngest child of Timothy Harland and his wife Anne Wilkinson - marriage extraction on IGI). I have not yet been able to determine baptismal information for either of these two people although there was a Harland family at Great Driffield. Timothy Harland married Ann Wilkinson 24 Jun 1723 at Great Driffield.

I returned to working on the Hinxman will and made a couple of good breakthroughs with the text. It is moving along and I hope to finish it by the end of next week.

Tomorrow we have company for dinner and hope to get in a short canoeing trip. I will likely get some transcription done now that it is flowing a little better.