Finding a new branch of our Family

Following a New Branch of Our Family Tree

St Peter and Paul Church, Swalcliffe.  All 11 children were baptised here.

Every now and then, family history research opens a door that you didn't even know was there.

This time, that door was opened by my cousin Ryan Dudley, whose research has uncovered a whole new branch of our family tree.

Ryan has traced this line back through our 4th great-grandparents, Bathsheba Slatter and her husband John Baker, and from there continued backwards through the generations to our 8th great-grandparents.

For me, this is one of the wonderful things about family history. We begin with the people we know and gradually discover the generations who came before them.

In this case, our starting point is my maternal grandmother, Catherine Therese Baker.

 Following her family line backwards leads us to Bathsheba Slatter and John Baker, and then further and further into the eighteenth century.

Eventually, the research brought us to Matthias Green and Ann Lampit of Swalcliffe, Oxfordshire, who married on 22 January 1759.

And suddenly, names that had been hidden away in parish registers for more than 250 years began to emerge.

Their story is one I found particularly poignant.

Matthias and Ann had at least eleven children between 1759 and 1776. Several appear to have died in infancy or childhood, and the repeated use of the names Martha and William seems to reflect the loss of earlier children.

It is easy to look at these people simply as entries in an old parish register. But when we follow the family through the generations and realise that these were our ancestors, the story becomes much more personal.

I am especially grateful to Ryan for doing the research that uncovered this branch of our family tree. Without his work, these people and their stories might have remained hidden from us.

What began with our grandmother Catherine Therese Baker has taken us back eight generations further than we previously knew.

And there is something quite special about that.

More than two centuries after Matthias and Ann lived in Swalcliffe, their names have found their way back into our family story — and they will now be remembered by another generation of their descendants.

Family life in eighteenth-century England
An eighteenth-century illustration giving us an impression of rural family life during the period when Matthias and Ann Green were raising their family in Swalcliffe, Oxfordshire. This is not a depiction of the Green family.

The Green Family of Swalcliffe – A Family Remembered

Sometimes, when researching family history, a collection of names and dates suddenly becomes something much more than a family tree.

That happened to me while researching Matthias Green and his wife, Ann Lampit, who lived in the Oxfordshire village of Swalcliffe in the eighteenth century.

Matthias and Ann were married at Swalcliffe on 22 January 1759. Their marriage was witnessed by Thomas Walker and Nath. Walker. Swalcliffe was their home, and it was here that they raised their family.

The parish of Swalcliffe has remarkably long surviving parish registers, with baptisms and burials recorded from 1558 and marriages from 1567. These old registers are invaluable to family historians because, before civil registration began in England in 1837, parish records were the principal records of births, marriages and deaths.

A growing family

The records I have found so far show that Matthias and Ann had at least eleven children between 1759 and 1776:

1. Martha Green, a twin, born 1759 died 1760
2. Elizabeth Green, a twin, born 1759
3. William Green, born 1761 died before 1767
4. Martha Green, born 1763 died 1764
5. Matthias Green, born 1765
6. William Green, born 1767
7. Ann Green, born 1768
8. Mary Green, a twin, born 1772
9. Martha Green, a twin, born 1772 died 1773
10. Martha Green born 1774
11. Thomas Green, born 1776

At first glance this is simply a list of children. But looking more closely at their names and dates reveals a much more poignant story.

There are four daughters named Martha and two sons named William.

The first Martha was born in 1759. Another Martha appears in 1763 and died in 1764. A third Martha was born in 1772 and died in 1773, and a fourth Martha was born in 1774.

Something similar happened with the name William. William was born in 1761 and died before 1767. Another William is born in 1767

This repeated use of the same names is consistent with a practice that was not uncommon in earlier generations: when a child died, a later child might be given the same name.

But behind those names are real children.

The children behind the names

It is easy, when looking at an eighteenth-century family tree, to see only dates:

1759–1763.

1761–1767.

1772–1774.

Yet each of those entries represents a little boy or girl who was part of Matthias and Ann's family.

The records currently suggest that several of their children died in infancy or childhood. I am still working to locate the individual burial records so that I can be certain that each death date has been correctly attributed to the right child.

This is particularly important because of the repeated names. It would be very easy to assume that two children with the same name were actually the same person. The sequence of baptisms and burials, however, appears to show that these were separate children.

And so the family story becomes one of both joy and loss.

Between 1759 and 1776, Matthias and Ann welcomed at least eleven children into their family. Some lived to adulthood, while others appear to have been taken from them when they were still very young.

What the records cannot tell us

Of course, the parish register cannot tell us how Matthias and Ann felt when a child died.

It cannot tell us about the grief of losing a little daughter called Martha, or a young son called William. It cannot tell us what it was like to bury one child and then, some years later, welcome another baby who was given the same name.

Nor can we know what memories of those children remained within the family.

But perhaps the repeated names tell us something.

By giving another daughter the name Martha, and another son the name William, their names did not disappear from the family. In a small way, those children who had died continued to be remembered.

A family in eighteenth-century Oxfordshire

Matthias and Ann were part of a community that had been recording the lives of its people for generations. The parish registers of Swalcliffe stretch back to the sixteenth century, providing an extraordinary record of ordinary people who lived, married, raised families and were buried in the village.

I find it strangely moving to be able to follow this particular family across those old pages more than two and a half centuries later.

These people are my ancestors, although they are many generations removed from me. I never knew them, and they could never have imagined that someone so far in the future would one day be looking for their names.

Yet as I piece their story together, they begin to feel less like names on a chart.

They were Matthias and Ann.

They married in Swalcliffe in January 1759.

They had children.

They lost some of them.

And they carried on.

There is still more to discover. I am particularly keen to find the original burial entries for the children whose deaths have been recorded in family trees and indexes. Those records may allow me to replace uncertainty with evidence and, perhaps, learn a little more about this family and the lives they lived in eighteenth-century Swalcliffe.

For now, though, I think it is worth pausing over their names.

Martha. Elizabeth. William. Martha. Matthias. William. Ann. Mary. Martha. Thomas.

Eleven children.

One family.

And, more than 250 years later, they are still remembered.

A Little Help Along the Way

As with some of my other family-history stories, I have had a little help from ChatGPT in bringing the research together and turning dates, names and discoveries into a story that is easier for our family to read and enjoy. The research itself comes from the family history research of Ryan Dudley and the sources we have found along the way.