Hingston Newsletter No 3

Issued April 2013


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 April 2013) 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 third 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. Newsletter No 1 and No 2 are still available.

Exciting News! - William Edward Hingston's Study found

We have known for some time that William (WEH) carried out a study of the Hingstons, starting in about 1880. Just before his death early in 1906 he was planning to publish a book, or "Register" as he called it, and in preparation for this his notes were being typed up by Lavinia Hingston. About 20 pages of that typescript survived in Lavinia's family and have been available on this site for some time as the Vine Tree. But of the rest of William's study little remained except copies of a few letters he had written to other Hingstons elsewhere: it was assumed that his own papers had been lost or thrown away by his family.

Last year I received an exciting email from Florence McQuinn who lives near Washington DC in the USA. She is a granddaughter of William and had boxes of his files and correspondence. She recognised that this formed part of the missing entries from his study. She was also aware that other members of the family had other boxes of papers and she has now found all of the missing parts of his study and has agreed that I can post them on this web site. Florence would like at some stage to publish the book that WEH was working on, so wishes to retain copyright of the material, but in the meantime she has agreed that it can be incorporated into the personal family histories of descendants of the Hingstons.

I have so far transcribed the register into a single large file (>600 kbytes of text), but I intend to split it up into family groups and to incorporate WEH's information into the existing trees where appropriate. I have so far cross-linked Trees HA (my tree), HNC (WEH's own tree), HH (the Moreleigh/Canada tree) which is now liniked to HL (the Mevagissey tree) and HP (The Ipswich Hingstons, including John Hingston, Cromwell's organist). I have also included WEH's link between the Lyme Regis Hingstons (who we only knew about before from the 1851 census) into Tree HM as HM#20 becuase he had been told that they came from there. I will add cross-links to other trees when I have time.

A word of warning - not everything is right - like all of us he made assumptions about links based on similarity of names and physical proximity, and not all of his assumptions were correct. But the vast majority seems to agree with what we already know, and to fill in gaps. It also gives us glimpses of the real lives of the people concerned because he gives some description of what people had been doing. WEH's work is a monumental effort, given that he didn't have access to the censuses, nor to many wills and he had to do it all by correspondence, which would have taken weeks to cross the ocean. There were no photocopiers, so if he wanted to keep a copy of a letter he had to write it twice, But he would also have had access to things like family bibles, and to memories of people alive in the 1890s, who themselves might have been born in the 1820s, and their family memories would go back even further. I am astonished by the amount he managed to accummulate.

John Hingston, Cromwell's Organist

John Hingston (HP#2), who is arguably the most famous Hingston, has been claimed as the ancestor of several branches of the Hingston family. The problem is that he seems to have been unmarried and to have left no chiildren. We knew that his nephew, Peter (HP#4), became an organist in Ipswich, in Suffolk, and we knew that the first record of John was as a young chorister at York Minster. I discovered last year that John Fitch, who had been Vicar at Reydon in Suffolk, where one of Peter's descendants had also held the living, had studied the family and when he retired had deposited his papers at the Gainsborough Museum in Suffolk. Amongst those papers was a copy of John's will, which clearly states that he was born in the parish of St Lawrence, in York, rather than in Devon, as many people, including WEH, believed. I have also tracked down two scholarly works, aimed primariily at analysing John's music, but also giving details of his life. It is now certain that John was the son of Thomas Hingston, Vicar of St Lawrence, that he served in the choir at York Minster as a boy, and then in the household of the Earl of Cumberland at Skipton Castle, probably up to the time when the castle was sacked in the Civil War in 1645. He never seems to have worked for Charles I, as some sources suggest, but in 1654 he entered the service of Cromwell, as music teacher to his daughters, and after the Restoration served Charles II. He must either have been completely uninterested in politics, or flexible enough in his views, to have flourished in these circumstances. None of the sources mention a wife or children: in his will he made extensive provision for nephews and nieces, so it is very unlikely he would not have mentioned his own children if he had any. The idea that he was anyone's ancestor must be discounted.

Major James Hingston (HN#4), who founded the Irish Hingstons, is often claimed to have been his son, which thus can't be true, but it remains possible that he was another of John's nephews.

Inquisitions Post Mortem

We should be able to follow parish records back to about 1600 but before that it is much harder to find records. We have to rely on wills but most of the Devon wills were lost in the 1942 Blitz on Exeter. What has survived are copies of Inquisitions Post Mortem (IPM). These were essentially court proceedings to see who should inherit land when there was any uncertainty, and they give us a tantalising window into the Hingston world. But they seem only to have been held when the deceased had significant property, and only when there was doubt about who should inherit. Ken Ozark sent me copies of the six IPMs that refer to the Hingstons, and these have now been transcribed.

Two of these, for Robert in 1488 and his son Philip in 1511, are amongst the earliest references we have to the Hingston family. They show links between the Hingstons living at Hingston Farm and those at Wonwell, which ties in well with the top of Tree HD, and show that both Robert and Philip had built up extensive land holdings over a large area. However, it seems that the only living descendants of these two were daughters, so the property passed out of the Hingston family when they married. Despite these men being prominent early Hingstons, it seems we must look to their cousins to find the link back to the earliest Hingston. WEH had clearly done more on this aspect, but I need to spend time sorting it all out.

Devon Lay Subsidy Roll

The Devon Lay Subsidy roll was a survey (for tax purposes) taken in the years 1543 to 1545. It lists anyone who was liable to pay tax, so lists only the Head of the Household - usually a man although widows were also listed - and only the wealthier members of the population. My estimate is that about half of the families were included - the others were presumably too poor to be worth bothering about. There isn't enough in the lists to follow family lines, but they do prove that there were Hingstons in many different villages at that time.

I have used this information, combined with the IPMs and what we already know, to produce a chart (designed to be printed at A3 size) which shows what we know for the early Hingstons in South Devon, both in place (West to East from Plymouth to Dartmouth), and through time from 1750 back to 1400. The horizontal lines are drawn at 25 year intervals, so should correspond roughly to the generations.

Two things are clear. There are still very many gaps to fill in before we can link all the lines together, and indeed we are unlikely ever to be able to do so because of the lack of detailed records, and secondly the diaspora from the original family seat must have occurred well before the Subsidy Rolls were produced in the1540s. This is much earlier than believed by WEH, who believed that the family dispersed in about 1600.

Quaker Records

I recently visited the Friends House in London, which houses the Quaker reference library, looking for an obituary of Abel Hingston who died in Philapelphia in 1747. I believe he is the Abel, born 1666, the son of HD#6 Abel Hingston from Holbeton, and he must have been one of the earliest Quaker Settlers in William Penn's Pennsylvania. There is no mention in the records of any descendants, nor is there any mention of what happened to his siblings. We have no records for any of them and it is possible that they all went to Pennsylvania. The library also has a loose-leaf file containing the Dictionary of Quaker Biography; I have extracted all the Hingston entries and they are all now included in Tree HD.

Grave of Samuel James Hingston

I have had an email from Jon Vine <xjj772gvfd@gmail.com> who lives in Huntingdon, Quebec, and who has found the grave of Samuel James Hingston (HN#10) who fought in the war of 1812, which is located in a small walled area on Samuel's own land. It was a plaque erected by Harold Ramsey Hingston in 1964. Jon would like to hear from any of Samuel's descendants with a view to clearing up the site.

Descendants of Sir William Hales Hingston

I have made significant changes to the listings about the descendants of Sir William Hales Hingston (HN#12), including new families HN#60, HN#61 & HN#62.

Obituary of Dr Cicely Lamorna Hingston

Cicely was the daughter of Richard Hingston (HD#68) and had an interesting career as a doctor, which is now described in her obituary. This is the sort of information I would like to include for more people of the site to show what their lives were really like.

William Henry Hingston

I have just added a new family to Tree HD (HD#89). His son John emigrated to Canada after WWI.

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.

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, 9th April 2013