Proposed descent from Henry II to Francis Hayden, early immigrant to Maryland

[Patrick Nielsen Hayden]

Plus, questions about historical consciousness!

But first, the actual descent. From Henry II to Sir Robert de Holand,
we're just working with Ancestral Roots, 8th edition, buttressed by
other standard historical reference sources. So:

Henry II, King of England (1133-1189) = Ida

William Longespee, Earl of Salisbury (abt 1170-1226) = Ela (1191-1261)

Sir Stephen Longespee (1214-1260) = Emeline de Ridelisford (1220-1276)

Ela Longespee (1246-1267) = Sir Roger la Zouche (1242-1285)

Sir Alan la Zouche (1267-1314) = Eleanor de Segrave (1270- )

Maud la Zouche (1289-1349) = Sir Robert de Holand (abt 1283-1328)

Sir Robert de Holand (abt 1312-1373) = Elizabeth

Sir John de Holand (abt 1348-aft 1409) = Margaret
[Douglas Richardson, "Complete Peerage Addition: Parentage of Elizabeth
Holand, wife of Sir Roger Fiennes", two articles for
soc.genealogy.medieval, April 28 & 29, 2004.]

Elizabeth de Holand (1385-1449) = Roger de Fiennes, MP (1384-1449)
[L. S. Woodger, "Fiennes, Sir Roger (1384-1449)", in The History of
Parliament: The House of Commons 1386-1421, ed. J.S. Roskell, L. Clark,
C. Rawcliffe, 1993. Also Douglas Richardson, "Complete Peerage
Addition: Parentage of Elizabeth Holand, wife of Sir Roger Fiennes," as
above.]

Margaret Fiennes (1415-1503) = Nicholas Carew, MP (abt 1395-1458)
[L. S. Woodger, "Fiennes, Sir Roger (1384-1449)", as above.]

Nicholas Carew (abt 1436-1466) = Margaret Langford (abt 1438-1501)
["Parishes: Purley", in A History of the County of Berkshire: Volume 3,
ed. P. H. Ditchfield & William Page, 1923, pp. 417-422.]

Elizabeth Carew (abt 1465- ) = Walter Twynyho (abt 1465-aft 1508)
["Parishes: Nutfield", in A History of the County of Surrey: Volume 3,
ed. H. E. Malden, 1911, pp. 222-229.]

Edward Twynyho (abt 1488-1526) = Edith Stileman (abt 1488 - ?)
["Parishes: Shipton Oliffe and Shipton Solers", in A History of the
County of Gloucester: Volume 9, ed. N. M. Herbert, 2001, pp. 187-208.
Also D. F. Coros, "Heydon, Henry (by 1507-59), of Watford, Herts.", in
The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1509-1558, ed. S.T.
Bindoff, 1982. Also the 1572 Visitation of Hertfordshire, London,
Harleian Society Publications, v. 22, p. 11.]

Anne Twynyho (1509-1559) = Henry Heydon, MP (bef 1507-1559)
[D. F. Coros, "Heydon, Henry (by 1507-59), of Watford, Herts.", as
above. Also the 1572 Visitation of Hertfordshire, as above. Also, a
court case, "Heydon v. Lawrence," plaintiffs: Henry Heydon, esquire,
Anne his wife, and John Dauntesey, gentleman; defendant: Robert
Lawrence; subject: land (described) belonging to the manor of Shipton
Sollars, late of Edward Twynnho, deceased, father of the said Anne and
of Katherine late the wife of the said John. Date: 1553-1555. Held by
the National Archives, Kew.]

Francis Heydon (abt 1540-1606) = Frances Longueville (1538-1598)
[The 1572 Visitation of Hertfordshire, as above; in fact, Francis was
the signatory for the "Heydons of the Grove" pedigree. Also George
Lipscomb, The History and Antiquities of the County of Buckingham,
volume IV, 1847, page 415. Also "Parishes: Shipton Oliffe and Shipton
Solers", as above.]

Edward Heydon (1561-1617) = Frances Burr (1574-1605)
[The 1572 Visitation of Hertfordshire, as above. For his birth,
"England Births and Christenings, 1538-1975," index, FamilySearch
(https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.1.1/J973-LJD), Edward Heydon, 03 Dec
1561; citing ST MARYS, WATFORD, HERTFORD, ENGLAND, reference; FHL
microfilm 991355. Father's name is given as "Francis Heydon." For their
marriage 17 Nov 1597, image in hand from the parish register of St.
Mary's, Watford, Hertfordshire, now in the county records office of
Hertfordshire; obtained via findmypast.co.uk. Also "Parishes: Shipton
Oliffe and Shipton Solers", as above.]

Edward Heydon (1602 - ?) = Ellenor Whitehead (1605 - ?)
[For his baptism, image in hand from the parish register of St. Mary's,
Watford, Hertfordshire, now in the county records office of
Hertfordshire. Obtained via findmypast.co.uk. Describes him as "Edward,
son of Edward Heydon." For their marriage, 1 Nov 1627, image in hand
from the parish register of St. Mary's, Watford, Hertfordshire, now in
the county records office of Hertfordshire, obtained via
findmypast.co.uk.]

Francis Hayden (1628-1694) = Thomasine Butler (1630-1702)
[For his baptism, "England Births and Christenings, 1538-1975" index,
FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.1.1/NR4S-861: accessed
20 Jul 2014), Francis Haydon, 14 Aug 1628; citing ST MARYS, WATFORD,
HERTFORD, ENGLAND, reference; FHL microfilm 991355. Father's name is
given as "Edward Hayden"; his birth is nine and a half months after the
marriage, in the same church, of Edward Heydon b. 1602 to Ellenor
Whitehead. For his death, bef 12 June 1694, or perhaps bef 12 June
1697, St. Mary's County, Maryland. Maryland Calendar of Wills, Volume
2. His will, apparently dated 30 April 1697, is transcribed in Maryland
and Virginia Colonials by Sharon J. Doliante (Baltimore: Genealogical
Publishing Company, 1991), as is the endorsement that "On the back of
the ffore Goeing it was Thuss Endorsed Viz June ye 12th 1697. The
within Wrighten will was proved before me According to Law as wittness
my Hand and Bore the Day and Yeare above Written. [Hall of Records,
Wills, Liber 6, ff. 134-135.]" There is some confusion about the actual
year of his death, because his wife Thomasine was sued in her own name
in 1694, by her son-in-law Thomas Allman and her daughter Penelope, in
a dispute over personal property. As Doliante points out, Thomasine
could not have been sued in her own name if Francis had been living.
Further, on a deed executed in 1696, his daughter Penelope described
herself as "daughter and heiress of Francis Heydon, deceased." It seems
likely that the date on Francis's will was somehow mistranscribed.
NOTE: He was the first immigrant Hayden in Virginia and Maryland, and
the first to spell his surname Hayden, although he reverted to Heydon
when drawing up his will.]

Additions, corrections, and for that matter debunkings are all welcome;
I'm relatively new to this kind of research, but not so new that I
haven't already had the experience of painstakingly tracing a line to
historically-interesting people, only to discover that the line
founders on an inconvenient fact.

As a pretty-damn-sure descendant of the immigrant Francis Hayden, I am
of course interested in whether this line is "correct," or at least
plausible. But assuming it is, my further question, which I hope will
interest at least one or two of the experts who periodically post to
this newsgroup, is this: How aware would a minor gentry figure like
Francis Heydon (not the immigrant, but his great-grandfather,
1540-1606) have been of his own descent from various mighty figures of
English, Scottish, and Welsh history? Would he have had any clue that
his Twynyho mother was descended, via Carews, Fienneses, de Holands,
etc., from Henry II? Or, for that matter, also through the
Twynyho/Carew connection, from endless hard-to-spell Welsh figures like
Angharad verch Rhys (1160-1226), or Magna Carta figures like Roger le
Bigod and his son Hugh?

My sense is that he would _not_ have known these things; he would have
had some idea that his mother's Twynyho forebears married some
offspring of important families, just as he did when he married Frances
Longueville, but he would have had only a vague idea of the specifics
beyond at most three or four generations back. Specifically, my
tentative guess is that, for those of us in 2014 with documented
ancestors in the English gentry ca. 1400-1600, it is today possible to
know vastly more about our ancestry stretching back to the fifth to
seventh centuries than almost any of our actual medieval ancestors did.
(Leaving aside the crowned heads for whom this kind of detailed
knowledge was of, literally, existential importance.)

I edit science fiction for a living, so I'm very taken with the idea
that, in the future, vastly more people will know vastly more proven
facts about their own personal ancestry, going back vastly more
centuries, than has ever before been the case. Am I wrong? I welcome
explanations of the breadth and depth of my error.

--
Patrick Nielsen Hayden
p...@panix.com
about.me/patricknh

[Matt Tompkins]

That's an interesting question, to which the answer may be a paradox. In a society where lineage was desperately important, both for social prestige and as the basis of landownership, you'd expect everyone to have had a very detailed knowledge of their ancestry going back many generations. And they often did: IPMs sometimes identify heirs whose connection with the deceased tenant-in-chief was via a common ancestor five or six generations back - see:

http://blog.inquisitionspostmortem.ac.uk/2013/01/up-and-down-the-family-tree-or-medieval-heir-hunters/

Yet sometimes we find evidence of individuals who seem to have known little more than the names of their grandparents. Christine Carpenter discussed this in ch. 7 of her 1992 book Locality and Polity: a Study of Warwickshire Landed Society, 1401-1499, especially around pages 254-5. She thought the nobility generally did have accurate memories of their ancestry, but argued that the gentry often had 'a somewhat truncated memory of their past. The Warwickshire and Worcestershire Visitations of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries reveal downright errors in the recording of fifteenth-century ancestors, often abysmal ignorance of the names of wives, even of those that brought important inheritances with them, and in the case of the Worcestershire Visitation, made as early as the 1560s, a memory that rarely goes back as far as the fifteenth century.'

Matt Tompkins

[leslie...@gmail.com]

The supposed migration of Francis Haydon from
Watford to Maryland is just a guess, and it
might be totally wrong:


http://books.google.com/books?id=1KvkiaQks-kC&pg=PA334&dq=francis+haydon+watford&hl=en&sa=X&ei=gxgTVOOLAc60yASSxYHoDQ&ved=0CDYQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=francis%20haydon%20watford&f=false


Leslie

[Patrick Nielsen Hayden]

On 2014-09-12 16:03:32 +0000, lma...@att.net said:

The supposed migration of Francis Haydon from

Watford to Maryland is just a guess, and it

might be totally wrong:

http://books.google.com/books?id=1KvkiaQks-kC&pg=PA334&dq=francis+haydon+watford&hl=en&sa=X&ei=gxgTVOOLAc60yASSxYHoDQ&ved=0CDYQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=francis%20haydon%20watford&f=false

You're right. I have in fact read Doliante's book, and I should have included this qualification in the initial post. I think Doliante makes too much of the fact that the Francis Heydon/Hayden that was b. 1628 was the son and grandson of men named Edward, whereas the Francis Hayden who died in 1694 didn't name his only son Edward. It doesn't seem to me remarkable that people who left their birth families forever and relocated across an ocean might not maintain previous generations' patterns of naming. Yes, I know many trans-Atlantic emigrants did maintain those patterns. And many others didn't.

But I agree, we don't have absolute proof that the Francis who was born in Watford in 1628 was the Francis who married Thomasina Butler and settled in St. Mary's County. The dates match up very well, but perfect proof is lacking. I'm interested in the ancestry of the Heydons of Watford on the assumption that they _were_ Francis's forebears, but if it turns out they weren't (or if the question is never answered) I won't feel my time and attention was wasted.

[Patrick Nielsen Hayden]

On 2014-09-12 09:20:26 +0000, Matt Tompkins said:

> That's an interesting question, to which the answer may be a paradox.
> In a society where lineage was desperately important, both for social
> prestige and as the basis of landownership, you'd expect everyone to
> have had a very detailed knowledge of their ancestry going back many
> generations. And they often did: IPMs sometimes identify heirs whose
> connection with the deceased tenant-in-chief was via a common ancestor
> five or six generations back - see:
>
> http://blog.inquisitionspostmortem.ac.uk/2013/01/up-and-down-the-family-tree-or-medieval-heir-hunters/
>
>
> Yet sometimes we find evidence of individuals who seem to have known
> little more than the names of their grandparents. Christine Carpenter
> discussed this in ch. 7 of her 1992 book Locality and Polity: a Study
> of Warwickshire Landed Society, 1401-1499, especially around pages
> 254-5. She thought the nobility generally did have accurate memories
> of their ancestry, but argued that the gentry often had 'a somewhat
> truncated memory of their past. The Warwickshire and Worcestershire
> Visitations of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries reveal
> downright errors in the recording of fifteenth-century ancestors, often
> abysmal ignorance of the names of wives, even of those that brought
> important inheritances with them, and in the case of the Worcestershire
> Visitation, made as early as the 1560s, a memory that rarely goes back
> as far as the fifteenth century.'

Very interesting. Thanks for the pointers; I'd read other posts at
blog.inquisitionspostmortem.ac.uk ("Mapping the Medieval Countryside")
but not this one. And the Carpenter book sounds like it might be just
the thing to help me get a better sense of late-medieval minor gentry
and how they saw their own world.

In Graham Robb's fascinating book The Discovery of France (2007), about
the striking diversity of France's multitude of tiny regional cultures
before the modernization and centralization efforts of the 19th
century, he talks about the surprisingly short historical memory of
some of these microcultures:

"In the Tarn, 'the Romans' were widely confused with 'the English', and
in parts of the Auvergne, people talked about 'le bon C�sar', not
realizing that 'good old Caesar' had tortured and massacred their
Gallic ancestors. Other groups--the people of Sens, the marsh dwellers
of Poitou and the royal house of Savoy--went further and traced their
roots to Gallic tribes who had never surrendered to the Romans.

"Even if this was oral tradition, the tradition was unlikely to be very
old. Local tales rarely date back more than two or three generations.
Town and village legends had a rough, home-made quality, quite
different from the rich, erudite heritage that was later bestowed on
provincial France. Most historical information supplied by modern
tourist offices would be unrecognizable to natives of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. After a four-year expedition to Brittany, a
folklorist returned to Paris in 1881 to report--no doubt to the
disappointment of Romantic lovers of the misty Armorican
peninsula--that not a single Breton peasant had ever heard of bards or
Druids."

That said, obviously, when there's property and social standing at
stake, many people are going to prove remarkably adept at keeping track
of large swathes of history and genealogy. Heck, zillions of modern
everyday Mormons are aware, to some extent, of centuries of their own
personal genealogy, and that's just because of a religious requirement,
not something on which their individual personal wealth depends.

[Richard Smith]

On 12/09/14 10:20, Matt Tompkins wrote:

> Yet sometimes we find evidence of individuals who seem to have known
> little more than the names of their grandparents.

Famously so in the 15th century legal dispute over the Titchwell manor
in Norfolk, which has been written about in some detail (e.g. by P S
Lewis in /The Historical Journal/, vol 1, no 1 (1958), pp 1-20).

Sir John Fastolf had bought it in 1431 from the widow Margaret Lovel,
the last of the Lovels of Titchwell, believing it to be held in fee
simple. Sir Edward Hull and Thomas Wake, who were married to the
co-heiresses of Thomas Lovell of Clevedon thought Titchwell was held in
fee tail, and that under the entail their wives should inherit. The
wives' grandfather was also called Thomas Lovell, and he had died in
1401. It's pretty clear that by 1448 when the matter came to court,
no-one involved in the case was really sure who this Thomas's father had
been. Hull and Wake claimed Thomas was an uncle of Margaret of
Titchwell, but the evidence then as now suggests this probably wasn't true.

It seems surprising that Thomas's granddaughters and should have been so
uncertain about Thomas's parentage. Thomas had held jure uxoris the
manors of Milton Clevedon, Somerset and Milstead, Kent, and the
granddaughters had inherited at least the former.

Richard

[hanin...@gmail.com]

Francis Hayden has a potential line to Edward III with a few chronological difficulties mostly stemming from the fact that Edmund Leversedge who married Eleanor Wrottesley is identified as the son born in 1485 to William Leversedge and Edith _____, which would greatly compress the possible birth events in the following generations (Anne Twynhoe and her sister Catherine were both married by 1532). I've seen at least one source attempt to resolve this by instead identifying him with that Edmund's uncle, the son of Robert and Agnes (Westbury) -- I've yet to see any contemporary sources to confirm or refute either choice.

If he is in fact the Edmund born in 1485, while it doesn't render the descent impossible (childhood marriages and adolescent parenthoods were not unheard of back then, especially among the upper classes), it still raises a doubt.

There is plenty of chronological room for descent from Eleanor Wrottesley herself, and that the names "Eleanor" and "Richard" appear among her proposed descendants does seem to support the hypothesis.

Edward III, King of England = Philippa of Hainaut
Lionel, 1st Duke of Clarence = Elizabeth de Burgh, 4th Countess of Ulster
Philippa, 5th Countess of Ulster = Edmund de Mortimer, 3rd Earl of March
Elizabeth Mortimer = Sir Henry Percy
Elizabeth Percy = John Clifford, 7th Baron de Clifford
Thomas Clifford, 8th Baron de Clifford = Joan Dacre
Matilda Clifford = Sir Edmund Sutton
Dorothy Sutton = Richard Wrottesley
Eleanor Wrottesley = Edmund Leversedge
Christiane Leversedge = Anthony Stilman
Edith Stilman = Edward Twynhoe
Anne Twynhoe = Henry Heydon
Francis Heydon = Frances Longueville
Edward Heydon = Frances Burr
Edward Heydon = Eleanor Whitehead
Francis Hayden = Thomasine Butler

[Patrick Nielsen Hayden]

An Edward III descent seems unlikely for the reasons you note. But
looking at all the names here that are new to me -- basically,
Christiane Leversedge up to Matilda Clifford -- I find myself
transfixed by a more interesting question: Is this the Edmund
Leversedge of the _Vision of Edmund Leversedge_, the first-person
account of a set of visionary experiences by a gentleman of Frome,
Somerset in May 1465?

According to the Visitation of Wiltshire 1565, Anthony Stylleman of
Steeple Ashton, father of a "Katherine [!] mar. to . . . Twynyho of co.
Gloc.", himself "mar. Christian, da. of Edmond Leverseidge of Valleyes,
co. Som'set, Esq." And via Google Books, I find the 1905 _Notes and
Queries for Somerset and Dorset, Volume 9" --

http://books.google.com/books?id=JsUxAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA19&lpg=PA19&dq=edmund+leversedge&source=bl&ots=HQ9Oc8t6He&sig=ooylBA0ua7EVfsKaCwHGmaywY0g&hl=en&sa=X&ei=sSROVIKjBdPnsATTs4KoDQ&ved=0CCIQ6AEwATgK#v=onepage&q=edmund%20leversedge&f=false


-- which contains, on page 19, a brief essay by E. Margaret Thompson
introducing her transcript of Leversedge's _Vision_. She describes
Edmund Leversedge as "a younger son of Robert Leversedge (or
Leversegge) lord of the manor of Frome-Braunche or Frome Falaise
(Valeys, Vallis)", which would seem to connect the Leversedge of
"Valleyes, co. Som'set" in the 1565 Visitation of Wiltshire to the
Leversedge described by modern scholars like this one --

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/518569?uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&sid=21104411520311


-- and this one --

http://books.google.com/books?id=rFVHZF35ybgC&pg=PA40&lpg=PA40&dq=edmund+leversedge&source=bl&ots=mSfl_lUJNC&sig=9Fm-drads26H4bSnLPXr3XlMvRE&hl=en&sa=X&ei=AiBOVK_zD8O1sQTj1oLADQ&ved=0CDMQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=edmund%20leversedge&f=false


-- as "of Frome, Somerset." I note also that several online sources
give Anthony Stilman's birth year as 1465, which means the Edmund
Leversedge who was Anthony's father-in-law was very plausibly alive in
that year. So it looks to me like these Edmund Leversedges are the same
individual. I welcome confirmation or correction with bated breath...

[Patrick Nielsen Hayden]

To be clear -- this is an afterthought to my initial gabbling about the
author of the _Vision of Edmund Leversedge_ -- it seems to me that if
Brad Verity's 2002 post about the marriage of Richard Wrottesley and
Dorothy Sutton --

http://archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com/th/read/gen-medieval/2002-05/1020622200

-- is correct in its (evidently painstakingly-worked-out) dates,
Dorothy Sutton couldn't have begun having children until about 1480,
which _almost_ entirely excludes the possibility that the Edmund
Leversedge who married a daughter of Richard Wrottesley and Dorothy
Sutton could have been the Edmund Leversedge who was the son of Robert
and Agnes, i.e., the Edmund Leversedge who wrote the visionary
manuscript.

To the best of my knowledge (corrections welcome), among the very
things we know about the older Edmund are that he had his vision in
1465 and he died in 1496. It's admittedly _remotely_ possible that
could have married, and had issue by, a teenaged daughter of Richard
Wrottesley and Dorothy Sutton in the last two or three years of his
life. But it seems much more likely that if any Edmund Leversedge
married a daughter of theirs, it was the younger one, the older
Edmund's nephew, born in 1485.

So unless I'm missing something, the problem with the hypothesized
Edward-III-to-Francis-Hayden descent is that neither of these scenarios
work very well without a lot of strenuous date-adjusting and
young-teenaged-mother-birth-giving over multiple generations. If the
older Edmund Leversedge marries a fifteen-year-old Wrottesley/Sutton
daughter in 1495 and they immediately set about conceiving and giving
birth to the future wife of Anthony Stilman, succeeding just before he
dies in 1496, you've got to move the birth year of Anthony's daughter
Edith, wife of Edward Twynyho, to about 1510 at the earliest. And this
means that _her_ daughter Anne, who married Henry Heydon of the Grove
(1507-1559), would have to be born around 1525, which sits rather
uncomfortably with the fact that Henry Heydon's entry in the History of
Parliament --

http://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1509-1558/member/heydon-henry-1507-59


-- says that he and Anne ("da. of Edward Twyneho of Shipton Sollars,
Glos.") were "m. by 1532."

And if it's the younger Edmund Leversedge who marries a
Wrottesley/Sutton daughter, the problem is even worse, because the
younger Edmund was born in 1485 and is very unlikely to have begun
siring children until about 1500, which gives us five _fewer_ years
into which to squeeze all that very energetic begetting.

Whereas if we just forget about Edward III, the dates for Francis being
descended from the elder Edmund Leversedge work out just fine. There
are even a few generations worth of Mr. Visionary Manuscript's own
ancestry presented in that 1905 Notes & Queries article, not that I
have any idea how good E. Margaret Thompson was as a genealogist. It
does leave open the question of the identity of Edmund Leversedge's
daughter's mother. Presuming that the 1565 Visitation of Wiltshire is
correct and Anthony Stilman really did marry a "Christian, da. of
Edmond Leverseidge of Valleyes, co. Som'set, Esq.", I don't know any
hard facts that require that Christian's mother be Eleanor Wrottesley
or any other offspring of the Sutton/Wrottesley union. Does anyone?

[Brad Verity]

On Monday, October 27, 2014 6:51:45 AM UTC-7, Patrick Nielsen Hayden wrote:
> To be clear -- this is an afterthought to my initial gabbling about the
> author of the _Vision of Edmund Leversedge_ -- it seems to me that if
> Brad Verity's 2002 post about the marriage of Richard Wrottesley and
> Dorothy Sutton --
> http://archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com/th/read/gen-medieval/2002-05/1020622200
> -- is correct in its (evidently painstakingly-worked-out) dates,
> Dorothy Sutton couldn't have begun having children until about 1480,
> which _almost_ entirely excludes the possibility that the Edmund
> Leversedge who married a daughter of Richard Wrottesley and Dorothy
> Sutton could have been the Edmund Leversedge who was the son of Robert
> and Agnes, i.e., the Edmund Leversedge who wrote the visionary
> manuscript.
> To the best of my knowledge (corrections welcome), among the very
> things we know about the older Edmund are that he had his vision in
> 1465 and he died in 1496. It's admittedly _remotely_ possible that
> could have married, and had issue by, a teenaged daughter of Richard
> Wrottesley and Dorothy Sutton in the last two or three years of his
> life. But it seems much more likely that if any Edmund Leversedge
> married a daughter of theirs, it was the younger one, the older
> Edmund's nephew, born in 1485.

Dear Patrick,

Your guess is correct. It was the younger Edmund Leversedge, the one born in 1485, who married Eleanor Wrottesley. This Edmund Leversedge of Vallis House died 7 September 1508, only aged 23. He was the son of William Leversedge of Vallis House (d. 1485), and his wife Edith. See the HOP bio of Sir Henry Long of Draycot Cerne, the second husband of Eleanor Wrottesley:
http://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1509-1558/member/long-sir-henry-1487-1556

My guess is that Christine Leversedge Stilman, since she named her daughter 'Edith', was the sister, not the daughter, of Edmund Leversedge of Vallis House (1485-1508), and so daughter of William & Edith Leversedge of Vallis House. Christine would then have named her daughter Edith after her own mother Edith.

Cheers, -----Brad

[Patrick Nielsen Hayden]

On 2014-10-27 20:01:18 +0000, Brad Verity said:

> My guess is that Christine Leversedge Stilman, since she named her
> daughter 'Edith', was the sister, not the daughter, of Edmund
> Leversedge of Vallis House (1485-1508), and so daughter of William &
> Edith Leversedge of Vallis House. Christine would then have named her
> daughter Edith after her own mother Edith.

That makes sense, and thanks for pointing it out.

[hanin...@gmail.com]

One would hope your guess is correct for all these young men and women's sakes...otherwise we could be looking at a long line of child marriages and barely-postpubescent parents. While such things were legal at the time, they weren't as common as modern pop culture often claims -- and a multigenerational succession of such marriages would have been all the more unusual.

We do know that Anthony Twynhoe, Anne's brother, was a minor in 1532 (see here: https://books.google.com/books?id=9MQxAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA418&dq=%221532%22+%22Anthony%22+%22Solers%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=o_iMVOyiNveSsQSYrICABg&ved=0CCIQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=%221532%22%20%22Anthony%22%20%22Solers%22&f=false). The age of majority for a male in that era was, if I'm not mistaken, 21. If Anthony and his sisters were a great deal younger than 21 at the time of his death, then let's at least hope there was a gap between the sisters' marriages and the consummations thereof. Does anyone have a reliable estimate of the birth dates of the Heydon and/or Dauntesey children?

[hanin...@gmail.com]

Another theory I've heard that makes sense (though I don't remember where or with what evidence it was published...perhaps somewhere on stillman.org) is that there were two consecutive Anthony Stillmans, and that it was the younger who married Christian Leversedge. If this is true, Edith could have been the daughter of the elder Anthony and thus the chronological problems of the Leversedge pedigree would be circumvented.

The eldest son of Anthony Stillman and Christian Leversedge, according to information gathered from the College of Arms and published on stillman.org, was Richard Stillman whose birth year is ubiquitously given as 1520; I'm trying without success to pin down a source for that birth year. If the year is correct and if Edith was indeed his sister (and not his aunt) and born not too long before 1520 herself, then maybe the apparent child marriage of her daughter Anne is exactly the uncomfortable thing it appears to be...

The presence of the names Richard and Eleanor among the children of Anthony and Christian is certainly something to consider, though it's possible those names came from the Leversedge side of the family via William Leversedge's uncle (according to this pedigree: https://books.google.com/books?id=hkcJAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA19&dq=Edmund+Leversedge+Westbury&hl=en&sa=X&ei=2AGOVI_9N6vLsATTqILACA&ved=0CB0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=Edmund%20Leversedge%20Westbury&f=false ) and, perhaps, William's Wynslade grandmother whose Christian is variously given as Elizabeth or Eleanor.

On Monday, October 27, 2014 4:01:20 PM UTC-4, Brad Verity wrote:

[hanin...@gmail.com]

There's a bit of a wrench thrown into our proposed pedigree.

It appears Francis Heydon, born in 1628, was not the son of Edward Heydon by Eleanor Whitehead. His father's name was Edward, but his mother, according to his christening record, was Frances.

I thought momentarily that the mother's name might have been a mistranscription (I'm looking at a record abstract through familysearch; they don't offer a view of the actual document). But then I noticed that Francis Heydon was christened
a little over nine months after Edward and Eleanor's marriage. Five months after Francis's christening came Edward and Eleanor's daughter Hannah. When you do the math, something isn't quite right.

One explanation might be that Eleanor Whitehead was Edward's wife, Frances was his mistress, and Francis Heydon was their illegitimate son. I haven't found a local marriage record for an Edward Heydon and a Frances, so this could very well be true.

Another possibility is, of course, that there were two different Edward Heydons in Watford in the 1620s.

> pnh @ panix .com
> about.me/patricknh

[hanin...@gmail.com]

I found another potential problem with our line.

The will of John George of Great Gaddesden (as found in "Abstracts of Wills in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury", currently viewable on Google Books) is dated 24 Aug, 18 James I (1621 if I'm not mistaken). This will mentions "Frauncis, wife of Edw. Heydon of Watford, and his bro., Wm. Heydon. This will also mentions "Henry Burre of Watford, his bro., John Burre", along with several other Burres.

It wouldn't be too much of a stretch to suppose that Frances mentioned in the above will was Frances Burr, wife of Edward Heydon.

In Eaton Bray, Bedfordshire (roughly 20 miles from Watford), 6 Jul 1562, there was a marriage of a Thomas Burre to a Jane George. Also in Eaton Bray, in 1574, was the baptism of Frances Burre whose parents are not listed in the record. I don't know for sure whether this is our Frances, but I think it's a promising lead.

Now here's where things get problematic. If you look at the article here -- http://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/glos/vol9/pp187-208 -- it says "Francis Heydon died in 1606 and his son and heir Edward was incorrectly described in 1608 as lord of Shipton Oliffe and Solers. After Edward Heydon's death in 1617 Shipton Solers manor belonged in remaindership to his wife Mary (d. 1625)." Unfortunately it gives no source for the latter statement, but if Edward Heydon of Shipton Solers died in 1617 and his widow was Mary, not Frances, then it would appear Edward Heydon who married Frances Burr was not the son of Francis Hayden and Frances Longueville.

On Thursday, September 11, 2014 at 8:34:53 PM UTC-4, Patrick Nielsen Hayden wrote:

> pnh@ panix. com
> about.me/patricknh

[wjhonson]

The problem of course, as many lines presented here, is the evidence that your Francis, living in Maryland, is the same person as that Francis baptised at Watford.

That is the issue on which you should concentrate your energies.

[wjhonson]

On Saturday, April 18, 2015 at 4:43:21 PM UTC-7, hanin...@gmail.com wrote:
> There's a bit of a wrench thrown into our proposed pedigree.
>
> It appears Francis Heydon, born in 1628, was not the son of Edward Heydon by Eleanor Whitehead. His father's name was Edward, but his mother, according to his christening record, was Frances.
>
> I thought momentarily that the mother's name might have been a mistranscription (I'm looking at a record abstract through familysearch; they don't offer a view of the actual document). But then I noticed that Francis Heydon was christened
> a little over nine months after Edward and Eleanor's marriage. Five months after Francis's christening came Edward and Eleanor's daughter Hannah. When you do the math, something isn't quite right.
>
> One explanation might be that Eleanor Whitehead was Edward's wife, Frances was his mistress, and Francis Heydon was their illegitimate son. I haven't found a local marriage record for an Edward Heydon and a Frances, so this could very well be true.
>
> Another possibility is, of course, that there were two different Edward Heydons in Watford in the 1620s.
>

> > Patrick Nielsen Hayden
> > pnh @ panix .com
> > about.me/patricknh

This illegitimate son theory is very doubtful.
You should get a photo copy of the actual entry to evidence that case.

[taf]

On Saturday, April 18, 2015 at 4:43:21 PM UTC-7, hanin...@gmail.com wrote:

> There's a bit of a wrench thrown into our proposed pedigree.
>
> It appears Francis Heydon, born in 1628, was not the son of Edward Heydon by Eleanor Whitehead. His father's name was Edward, but his mother, according to his christening record, was Frances.
>
> I thought momentarily that the mother's name might have been a mistranscription (I'm looking at a record abstract through familysearch; they don't offer a view of the actual document). But then I noticed that Francis Heydon was christened
> a little over nine months after Edward and Eleanor's marriage. Five months after Francis's christening came Edward and Eleanor's daughter Hannah. When you do the math, something isn't quite right.
>

Don't be so quick to dismiss this possibility. The baptismal record appears in FamilySearch as 24 Jan. 1629, but since they do not explicitly indicate the calendar variation, this could either be 24 Jan (1628/)1629 or 24 Jan 1629(/1630). If the latter, it would fall 17 months after. The next child of Edward and "Ellin" is not until 1632.

That being said, beware of confirmation bias. There is a tendency to look for a way that a contradictory record might be dismissed or otherwise reduced in value so that our hypothesis might still be true in spite of the contradiction, while any record that agrees tends to be accepted without question. It is something that all researchers must struggle with. Sometimes records do contain errors, but one must be particularly careful in positing this is the case in order to keep afloat a hypothesis that a primary record contradicts.

> One explanation might be that Eleanor Whitehead was Edward's wife, Frances was his mistress, and Francis Heydon was their illegitimate son. I haven't found a local marriage record for an Edward Heydon and a Frances, so this could very well be true.
>

This is unlikely, given what information we have. An illegitimate child, would be reported as son of the unmarried mother. Even were the record to name the putative father, it would still be expected to have the mother's surname, which this record appears to lack (based on the FamilySearch entry).

> Another possibility is, of course, that there were two different Edward Heydons in Watford in the 1620s.
>

There was an Edward having children in Watford as late as 1616 (no wife reported in abstracted record). 13 years between children is a large gap, but there could have been a sojourn in another parish or a second marriage.

taf

[Patrick Nielsen Hayden]

I think that between the problem shown below, the ambiguity presented by the name of the mother given on Francis-born-1628's baptismal record, and finally the general lack of evidence that Francis-born-1628 was the same person as Francis-died-1694, my "proposed descent" from several months ago can be set aside as an exercise rooted in error.  

Thanks to all who noted these several problems!

Patrick Nielsen Hayden

p...@panix.com

about.me/patricknh

[Jan Wolfe]

On Tuesday, April 21, 2015 at 1:31:38 PM UTC-4, taf wrote:
> On Saturday, April 18, 2015 at 4:43:21 PM UTC-7, hanin...@gmail.com wrote:
> > There's a bit of a wrench thrown into our proposed pedigree.
> >
> > It appears Francis Heydon, born in 1628, was not the son of Edward Heydon by Eleanor Whitehead. His father's name was Edward, but his mother, according to his christening record, was Frances.
> >
> > I thought momentarily that the mother's name might have been a mistranscription (I'm looking at a record abstract through familysearch; they don't offer a view of the actual document). But then I noticed that Francis Heydon was christened
> > a little over nine months after Edward and Eleanor's marriage. Five months after Francis's christening came Edward and Eleanor's daughter Hannah. When you do the math, something isn't quite right.
> >
>
>
> Don't be so quick to dismiss this possibility. The baptismal record appears in FamilySearch as 24 Jan. 1629, but since they do not explicitly indicate the calendar variation, this could either be 24 Jan (1628/)1629 or 24 Jan 1629(/1630). If the latter, it would fall 17 months after. The next child of Edward and "Ellin" is not until 1632.
>

...
>
> taf

In most cases that I have examined, the familysearch transcriptions list the year as given in the record. If that is the case in this set of records, the date of the baptism of Hannah would be 24 January 1629/30. I think you can fairly safely assume that this is the case in this set of records. If you click on the batch number in the familysearch.org record and then leave the name fields blank but specify a search for birth year range 1627-1630, you will see that a number of couples in this parish had a child baptized in the summer of one year and another child baptized in Jan-March of the next numerical year, as transcribed.

Of course, someone would need to examine the images of the parish register (FHL film 991355) to ascertain for sure the year for Hannah and to see if the mother's name in the baptism of Francis was a modern transcription error or possibly an error in the parish record itself.

These records are also available, with images, on Findmypast. Thus, for a moderate fee, someone interested in this research can examine the images. (Searching is free on findmypast, but I don't have a current subscription. I did confirm that the records for Francis and Hannah are listed with a symbol suggesting that images are available for both. The free search results just tell the year of the event and the place, not the names of the parents or what the event was.)

[Patrick Nielsen Hayden]

On 2015-04-21 22:50:57 +0000, Jan Wolfe said:

> Of course, someone would need to examine the images of the parish
> register (FHL film 991355) to ascertain for sure the year for Hannah
> and to see if the mother's name in the baptism of Francis was a modern
> transcription error or possibly an error in the parish record itself.
>
> These records are also available, with images, on Findmypast. Thus, for
> a moderate fee, someone interested in this research can examine the
> images. (Searching is free on findmypast, but I don't have a current
> subscription. I did confirm that the records for Francis and Hannah are
> listed with a symbol suggesting that images are available for both. The
> free search results just tell the year of the event and the place, not
> the names of the parents or what the event was.)

I have a current paid findmypast account, and as far as I can tell, the
actual images for these records are not available there.


--

[Jan Wolfe]

On Tuesday, April 21, 2015 at 7:21:03 PM UTC-4, Patrick Nielsen Hayden wrote:
>
> I have a current paid findmypast account, and as far as I can tell, the
> actual images for these records are not available there.
>
>
> --
> Patrick Nielsen Hayden

...
> about.me/patricknh

That is discouraging. When I look at the free record for these two events, I see a symbol of a camera in the right hand column. If I hover over the camera symbol, the pop up says one can view the image with a subscription or with pay-as-you-go credits. Did you click on the camera symbol and find there was no image? If so, I wonder what the camera symbol was supposed to mean. In other records I have viewed on findmypast, the camera symbol meant there was an image of the original record.

[Richard Carruthers via]

The image is there. It adds nothing to what you know except that by
viewing the page on can see that the event clearly occurred in 1628.
Of course, that should be clear from looking at the index entry via
familysearch as there the event is listed as having taken place on 14
August 1628, so there is, as would be expected, no Calendar year issue
involved.

Richard

> -------------------------------
> To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to
> GEN-MEDIEV...@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without the
> quotes in the subject and the body of the message
>

[taf]

On Tuesday, April 21, 2015 at 5:05:42 PM UTC-7, Richard Carruthers via wrote:
> The image is there. It adds nothing to what you know except that by
> viewing the page on can see that the event clearly occurred in 1628.
> Of course, that should be clear from looking at the index entry via
> familysearch as there the event is listed as having taken place on 14
> August 1628, so there is, as would be expected, no Calendar year issue
> involved.

The Calendar issue is with the next one - the 24 January "1629" Hannah Heydon baptism. If it was actually 1629/30, then the hypothesis that the 1628 record misreported the mother as Frances (the putative paternal grandmother) rather than Eleanor/Ellen is feasible. If that baptism actually occurred in 1628/29, then it is not.

taf

[Richard Carruthers via]

Okay, well that entry is under the heading January 1629, followed by
February 1629, and then March 1630, so it's Jan. 1629/30. The entry
reads "Hannah Daughter of Edward and Ellin Haydon -------- 24". It's
interesting to note that the entry directly beneath it reads "Ellin
Daughter of John and Ellin Cogdell ----------- 27". Perhaps that led
to some mental bleed over into the prior entry when the writer was
recording these events some time after the fact.

[taf]

On Tuesday, April 21, 2015 at 6:27:17 PM UTC-7, Louise Gibson via wrote:
> Okay, well that entry is under the heading January 1629, followed by
> February 1629, and then March 1630, so it's Jan. 1629/30. The entry
> reads "Hannah Daughter of Edward and Ellin Haydon -------- 24". It's
> interesting to note that the entry directly beneath it reads "Ellin
> Daughter of John and Ellin Cogdell ----------- 27". Perhaps that led
> to some mental bleed over into the prior entry when the writer was
> recording these events some time after the fact.

No, this one is right - Edward married Eleanor Whitehead several years earlier, and there is at least one other child baptized to Edward and 'Ellin'. It is the 1628 baptism where the mother is called Frances that is the odd one out.

taf

[Patrick Nielsen Hayden]

I don't know what I was doing wrong before, but I looked again and the images are in fact present. The entry for Francis's baptism clearly reads "Francis son of Edward and Francis Haydon -- 14".

To be completely clear, Edward's wife's name is given as "Francis," with an I, not Frances with an E. In the names of both Francises, the character is unambiguously an I with a very visible dot over it.

The last name is also very clearly spelled "Haydon", not "Heydon" as the Watford family usually spelled it. I note this only to be precise; it probably signifies nothing. The immigrant Francis Heydon appears to have used "Heyden" in the body of his will and "Heydon" in signing it. 

[hanin...@gmail.com]

I have often seen the female name "Frances" recorded as "Francis". Spelling was much more fluid back then than it is today.

So I think where we are with this is that it is chronologically and biologically possible that Hannah Heydon (b. 1630, not 1629) and the 1628 Francis Hayden were indeed brother and sister and that the recorded name of Francis's mother was a clerical error. So we don't necessarily have to eliminate Edward and Eleanor as the 1628 Francis's parents, but we'll need other evidence to confirm them.

And even if we do confirm them, we'll still have to contend with the two other challenges:

1. The article I previously cited, which says "Francis Heydon died in 1606 and his son and heir Edward was incorrectly described in 1608 as lord of Shipton Oliffe and Solers. After Edward Heydon's death in 1617 Shipton Solers manor belonged in remaindership to his wife Mary (d. 1625)." And how that conflicts with the information given in the will of John George of Great Gaddesden, that Edward of Watford's wife (or widow?) was Frances in 1621. I think we'll have to pin down the source of the article's claim about a Mary.

2. The biggest elephant in the room: the lack of clear evidence that the immigrant Francis Heydon was the same individual born in 1628.

I think even if we don't get around to #2, it's still worth the effort to sort out #1 -- because even if it's not our line, it is probably somebody's line somewhere, and that somebody will benefit from our work. And genealogy for the sake of genealogy...why not?