Waterworth Family

Our research

The major branches of our family tree are:

• Waterworth, Whipp, Pickles and Varley families from Yorkshire
• Hodgson, Kay, Dand and Simon families from Cumberland
• Anderson and Chappell families from Kent
• Pigden, Green, Lucas, Smith and Etherington familes from Bromley
• Farrant families from Devon
• Dellor and Fish families from Hertfordshire
• Gale, Wrixon and Field familes from Dorset

You can see our family tree in this ancestor chart. It shows the basic details of all the direct ancestors that we have found.

Or you can download our complete family tree as a GED file. If you have a family history application you can add the information to your tree.

Send an email to history@waterworth.org.uk with any questions, corrections or new information you have. We will get back to you as soon as we can.

Unusual names

We have some unusual names in our family tree. For example, we have two girls called Thomasin and two called Tabitha from Yorkshire, Shadrack Field from Somerset, Philadelphia Etherington from Kent, Skelton Hodgson from Cumberland and six men called Preston Pickles from Yorkshire. Names like these make the search more interesting, but can also make the search easier and give you more confidence in the accuracy of your findings.

Rarer names like Tabitha and Thomasin are great as any record you find with that name is likely to be for the person you are looking for. But they also tell you a lot about the family. According to the Oxford Names Companion, Tabitha is an Aramaic name equivalent to the Greek Dorcas and popular with Puritan and Dissenter families. Thomasin is the female form of Thomas, was once popular with Christian families, and has seen a recent revival in its contracted form of Tamsin.

Skelton is a fairly common family name in Cumberland and Yorkshire, but it is very rare as a given name. There are Skelton families in the same villages in Cumberland as my Hodgson descendants and Skelton Hodgson also has two near relations with Skelton as a second name. It is likely that a women with the surname Skelton married into the Hodgson family. Perhaps Skelton Hodgson's mother Mary was born Mary Skelton?

Finding a family full of people with the same name is not so helpful. The six Preston Pickles were all born in the villages of Grassington, Linton and Hebden in Wharfedale between 1783 and 1876. As they also have parents, siblings and children with similar names, it was hard to follow the parish records to sort out exactly who was who. According to the Oxford Names Companion, Pickles is an old English name for "someone who lived by a small field or paddock" and Preston is also old English and derived from the words for priest and enclosure or settlement. Preston is normally a surname so it's likely that we will also find some ancestors in that branch with Preston as their family name.

Handwriting and transcription errors

Now that our search is reaching back into the 17th and 18th centuries I've had to learn to read the handwriting that you find in older documents. The limited vocabulary helps—the documents are mostly lists of names, dates and simple facts—and I've also found some excellent reference documents online.

For secretary hand I use this guide at Scottish Handwriting.com.

For court hand and chancery hand I use the illustrations in Court-hand restored. As well as basic tables of letter forms the book also has lists of common contractions of names. This book was first written in 1778, which goes to show that this is not a new problem.

For copperplate and Spencerian scripts I actually use pages from an old school handwriting textbook.

Another advantage of learning to read these scripts is that you can check the accuracy of online indexes. The difficulty of interpreting the handwriting means that these indexes contain many transcription errors. So when I find a useful record in an index published at Ancestry.co.uk or a similar genealogy site, I always check the scanned image of the original document.

For example, here is part of a census document and the list of names given in the index. Do you think the names are transcibed correctly?

Waterworth origins

In the past, few people moved far from where they were born, leaving many family names concentrated in particular parts of the country. Knowing the origin and distribution of a family name can help you focus your search on the right areas.

The Ancestry.co.uk website now has a great feature that allows you to search for basic facts about a family name. The results include the origin of the name and the distribution of the name in the 1891 census.

We've know for some time that the origin of the Waterworth surname was in Lancashire. The map generated by Ancestry.co.uk shows that the name was still very much concentrated in Lancashire and Yorkshire in 1891. We suspect that although we have spread out a little bit, there will still be many more Waterworths in those counties today.

The maps also show some surprising distributions. For example, Anderson is a name from Scotland and the North of England, but my Anderson ancesters come from North Kent. The 1891 distribution maps for England and Wales and for Scotland do show that half the Anderson families are in Scotland, and most of the rest are Lancashire, Yorkshire, Durham, Northumberland and London. But Kent has the next highest concentration with 993 Anderson families.