Hingston Newsletter No 2

Issued June 2011


This newsletter has been sent by email to everyone who I know of who has contacted me about the Hingston One-Name study, and has also been posted on the web.

If you found this newsletter on the web and didn't receive a copy by email (by the end of June 2011) it means I don't have your email address. Please contact me so that I can add your email address for future mailings. I promise not to send you emails more than twice a year and I will not pass your email address to other people unless I am certain that you are closely related.

If you were sent a copy of this newsletter by email and do not wish to hear from me again, please contact me asking to remove your name from my address list.

Introduction

This is the second of an occasional series of Newsletters that I will issue when there have been major changes to the Hingston study pages. I have spent some time updating many pages on the web site. I originally planned to issue it in the Autumn of 2010 but suffered a disk crash which meant that I lost a lot of information, and have only recently found time to reinstate things. Newsletter No 1 is still available.

Wonwell Court Farm

In the summer of 2010 I visited Wonwell Court Farm, near the village of Kingston in the South Hams of Devon. It is very close to Hingston Farm, and we know that there were Hingstons there in the second half of the 15th Century. I was kindly shown around by Mrs Eve White, who farms there. The building has been remodelled many times, but part of it probably dates to the time when the Hingstons were there. The farm is less than one mile from the sea, but in common with most farms in the area is in a little dell so cannot be seen from the sea - apparently this was as a protection from raids by Barbary Pirates who were active off the Devon coast as late as the 17th Century.

Also in the summer of 2010 we holidayed in Ireland, which allowed me to look in the National Library of Ireland for records and to visit places associated with the Hingstons.

Aglish Lineage

In the National Library in Ireland there is a leather bound pocket book, probably carried by an army officer, entitled "Lineage of the families of Bernard, Hingston and Perceval of Co. Cork", which was probably written in the middle of the 19th Century and gives a fairly detailed lineage of the descendants of the Major Hingston who fought in the English Civil War for Cromwell and appears to have been the founder of the Hingstons at Aglish (Tree HNA). It is probably a copy of another document, but adds weight to our understanding of that line.

Aglish

We visited Aglish village which is some 20 miles west of the city of Cork, in what appears to be the very fertile valley of the River Lee. We found the entrance to Aglish House, but no one could tell us where Aglish church was - I have discovered subsequently that it is now in ruins and that we were very close to it! We will have to go back another year.

Cloyne Cathedral

We visited Cloyne Cathedral, which is a few miles to the east of Cork, and were given access by the caretaker. It is a large building, but as a Protestant Church in a largely Catholic area appears to be little used. It is almost devoid of seating, and the very extensive graveyard had been cleared of vegetation by spraying the whole place with weedkiller. We did though see the two memorials in the church to two James Hingstons (HN#18 and HN#31) from which we extracted some information to fill in gaps in those trees.

Whitehall and Cunamore

Whitehall is a large house on a peninsula that sticks out into Roaringwater Bay - aptly named since it faces south west and is exposed to the full force of the Atlantic gales. The land is thin, with many rock outcrops, and appears to be significantly less fertile than the area around Aglish. Cunamore is the tip of that peninsula. The old maps do not show many buildings near Whitehall, other than the big house itself, which appears to have been occupied by the Townsend family, not the Hingstons.

William Edward Hingston's Study

We have known for some time that WEH carried out a study of the Hingstons, of which the Vine Tree formed a part. We now have a letter he write in 1905 to Hingstons in Tasmania, shortly before he died, explaining how he got involved in the study and giving some lines of descent. But we are still lacking many of the details.

In that letter he describes a different line of descent in Tree HD between 1. Andrew and 12. James from that given by Allen and Dymond, but we do not know on what evidence it is based.

Quebec Bapism of Dorothea Hingston

The Quebec baptismal record of Dorothy Hingston and her husband John Abbott, who had emigrated from Ireland, provides documentary evidence for the existence of Dorothy's father, 30. Edward Hingston in Tree HN.

Legal case involving the Estate of John Hingston of Brent (HH#32)

When 32. John Hingston of South Brent in Devon died, he left most of his estate to a favoured nephew. But he had earlier made an arrangement with his brother, which remained in legal force although both regarded it as null and void. However, the arrangement had included a clause that John's niece, Dorothy Parnell, would receive £40 and she later sued the estate for that amount, which she won. The case received publicity and was written up in the press and legal journals.

Edward Peron Hingston

Edward Peron Hingston (1823-76) was a theatrical agent for the magician John Henry Anderson (Wizard of the North), the genial showman, Charles Farrar Browne (Artemus Ward) and the author Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain). His brother was James Hingston, a lawyer who practised in Australia; he published travel books. Their father was John Hingston, a cabinet maker of London, but WEH refers to both in his letter of 1905 and there is clearly a Devon connection. We now have further information and this has now been placed in Tree HO.

Please check your own link

Please check that the reference to your own connection to the web pages is correct. Many people have changed their email address since the pages were first written and the links no longer work.

I get many requests for copies of email addresses, but I rarely give them out since I wish to respect people's privacy. However, this means that in many cases cousins cannot get in touch. The best way to make sure that people know how to contact you is for me to add an entry, in the appropriate place in the tree, which says something like: "John Hingston was the grandfather of Jane Smith who can be contacted at jane.smith@somewhere.com". That does mean your email is visible but also means that cousins can contact you.

FreeBMD

The project, run by FreeBMD, to provide a searchable index of Birth, Marriage and Death records for England and Wales from 1837-1900 is now virtually complete. I have abstracted all the Hingston data but unfortunately I am not allowed to publish it here because of copyright. Most of the Hingston lines will use this data at some point. For the first time, it is now possible to check precisely how many entries there are. It seems that only about half of the Hingston entries in FreeBMD have counterparts in the Hingston web pages, so we still have some way to go! I have updated many entries to reflect the information that is now becoming available.

Contacting me

I can be contacted by email at Chris Burgoyne <cjb@eng.cam.ac.uk>. Please put [HING] before the subject so that I can correctly identify these emails and separate them from my normal emails. I have, at some time, typed most of the material on this site but I don't recall all the details; please help me by giving me details about which family you are referring to, and which individual, on which page. I will try to get back to you as soon as possible but the day job has to take priority.

Corrections

If there are errors in the web pages please let me know. There are probably spelling mistakes and possibly some broken links, or links that work in some browsers but not in others. If you find these I would like to correct them, so please let me know where they are.

Missing information

There are several places where we know that information should be available. If anyone is looking for a small project can I suggest the following:-

Thank you

Finally, some words of thanks. Most of the Hingston trees have not been researched by me; all I have done is to assemble them. They are the result of lots of small pieces of information which have been found by different people. That information then gets added into these pages, and often turns out to be the useful key that opens a door for other people. I try to spot the links between different trees, but I often miss things. Thank you to everyone who has helped put these pages together, and thank you in advance for the contributions you will make in the future.
Chris Burgoyne, Cambridge, 30th May 2011