HARDY FORUM ARCHIVE H03042 5/23/03 "THE PARISH AND GENEALOGY RECORDS"
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From: "Vincenzo Vivona" <vinvivo@tin.it>
Subject: the parish and british behaviour
Date: Fri, 23 May 2003 17:47:32 +0200
Hello in Tess' first chapter, the parish is able to recall the D'ubervilles' story from 1066 on...!!!! My cousin's husband P.A. Campbell, now living in Italy has been working on the story of her wife's family for three years, and I know all the difficulties he meets to go back in time sorting out lists and certificates. How could the good parish go back to the Norman invasion with such a reliability and be sure everything matches his researches ? I always wondered how Hardy could let the Parish be so precise. can we discuss this typical english habit (as my cousin P.A. Campbell clearly shows) ? cheers vincenzo vivona
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From: "Gary Alderson" <Gary.Alderson@btinternet.com>
Subject: Re: the parish and british behaviour
Date: Sat, 24 May 2003 09:30:14 +0100
Dear Vincenzo In the church at Bere Regis, where the Turbervilles (sp?) are buried, a stained glass window takes the family back, via records of its weddings, for what I seem to remember is about 2 hundred years'-worth of marriages. Our Queen traces her ancestry back to the Saxon king Alfred the Great, and he, being a Saxon, would have been able to trace his ancestry back to the god Woden! A friend of mine with the surname Broome claims his family came over from France in the time of the Plantagenets. English families in the middle ages and later were tied to the land they lived on, and manors were passed on >from father to son through the ages. I suppose the nearest literary account of this sort of thing, chronologically and geographically, is Wilfred Thorne Esq. in Trollope's Barchester Towers. "He counted back his own ancestors to some period long antecedent to the Conquest." So there's nothing intrinsically unlikely about an aristocratic English family knowing its origins across eight hundred years! But if the worst had come to the worst, I'm sure the seventeenth-century D'Urbervilles could have made up their ancestry as easily as the nineteenth-century ones. Gary Alderson
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Date: Sat, 24 May 2003 12:17:24 -0400
From: Shannon Rogers <srogers@mailhost.sju.edu>
Subject: Re: Fwd: Re: the parish and british behaviour
Dear Vincenzo,
The aristocracy would have very accurate records so, barring a fire or other disaster, they could be traced quite
easily. Peasant records would be more spotty. The later the family fell on hard times, the better---record keeping
became more careful as time went on, but it would be fairly easy to make the connection between the names and
follow the marriages and births back, with perhaps a few lapses here and there.
Cheers,
Shannon
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Date: Sat, 24 May 2003 13:07:08 -0400
From: Rosemarie Morgan <rosemarie.morgan@yale.edu>
Subject: Re: Fwd: Re: the parish and british behaviour
Status:
The Domesday Book (meaning the book of final authority) was started in England
in 1066 by William I. It provided a register of lands and owners of land. As
Shannon indicates, the aristocracy rarely needed to "make up" anything --
precise records were also kept in parish registers many of which are extant
and
go back hundreds of years (some even register illegitimate births).
Best,
RM
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From: "Gary1" <wesspix1@btinternet.com>
Subject: Re: the parish and british behaviour
Date: Sun, 25 May 2003 01:06:28 +0100
As my original comments indicated, I don't disagree with the principle -
English family tradition can go back a thousand years. And in parts of the
West Country, as Hardy indicated with his Noble Dames and the rest, the
records may well have been pretty good. And of course, families like the
Percys could go back hundreds of years. So if the d'Urbervilles had really
existed, I'm sure there would have been reasonable records of them. The
Turbervilles' links with Bere Regis are well-recorded, and I wasn't
suggesting they made their records up - only that it has been known (see
below).My point was only that you can't always tell.
Parish registers do indeed go back hundreds of years, where they haven't
been burnt or lost and have not fallen apart. But the compulsory order to
maintain them was not brought in until about the 16th century - 5 hundred
years or so after the Conquest. The Civil War and Commonwealth wrecked the
maintenance of a lot of parish registers. And loads of records in London
would have gone west in the 17th Century, for reasons of war, fire,
pestilence etc.
Also, Domesday didn't actually cover the whole country. Places under royal
ownership - such as the Forest of Dean - were ignored, as William didn't
need to assess them, and for that matter London never made it.
There were cases during the early modern period of "new" families making it
into the aristocracy, and casting around for an ancestry to make up or latch
onto - in the same way as the Stoke-d'Urbervilles. The Spencer family, I
believe, was one example - rising to wealth and power in the 16th century
and making a tenuous to the deSpencers who were favourites of Edward II.
Another example of a dodgy Norman pedigree is the Russell family (now Dukes
of Bedford), which came to power in the time of Henry VIII. Both midlands
families like the Stoke-d'Urbervilles.
And of course, Hardy himself liked to think he descended from an ancient
family - from Michael Millgate's Biography - "... he liked to think that it
was from a late-fifteenth century Clement le Hardy and his son John that
'the Dorset Hardys' were all derived, including the Thomas Hardye of
Frampton who endowed the Dorchester Grammar School in 1579 and the Thomas
Masterman Hardy of Portisham who was Nelson's flag-captain at Trafalgar". A
nice idea, but did he have the evidence to back it up? Was he a Durbeyfield?
Or just a Stoke-d'Urberville?
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Date: Sat, 24 May 2003 22:33:20 -0400
From: Rosemarie Morgan <rosemarie.morgan@yale.edu>
Subject: Re: the parish and british behaviour
Pity John Doheney isn't on this list-- this is right up his street. I
believe, in tracing the Hardy line he even scoured ancient school records.
I can't recall who started this thread but another fairly reliable family
record is family portraits. Many older English families tended to be
endomagous and nearly all had portraits painted at some point or other.
Where these two factors obtain-- and for this I can vouch personally-- the
family "face" in a 1562 family portrait and its modern day likeness many,
many generations on can be quite uncanny. No wonder Angel was unnerved by
the D'Urberville portraits -- the "family face" may not be flattering but
it's nearly always deeply disturbing.
Cheers,
Rosemarie
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