ROB & VAL HAYWOOD
of Leicester & Hull

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Valerie's maiden name was STEVENS, originally from Aylestone, but whose father was from Hinckley in Leicestershire. Other earlier STEVENS came from Enderby, Croft and even earlier from Oxfordshire.

Valerie's mother was a SWANWICK, from Blaby, south of Leicester. We have got as far back as 1797, but we're fairly sure now that they weren't from Blaby before then. The name alone possibly suggests a much more ancient medieval link to Nottinghamshire.

Val'smother's mother was a FRETTER from Aylestone near Leicester, but originally the family came from Spratton and Welford in Northamptonshire. We now have lots of info on the FRETTERS, and they may well have been German immigrants.

Both Valerie and I grew up in Leicester. Val attended Sir Jonathon North School on Knighton Lane East until 1967, and I was at Crown Hills Secondary School at the top of Gwendolen Road up to 1965. I had a brief period at Ashby Ivanhoe in the summer of 1965 after my parents separated. We met in 1968 whilst both were working at Simpkins & James in Horsefair Street. We now do have two or three pics of the shop,
purloined from various websites. Thank you to those contributors.

My HAYWOOD family are all originally from the Griffydam, Pegs Green and Coleorton areas of NW Leicestershire, roughly in the Coalville-Ashby-Whitwick triangle. Any more information prior to 1852 would be very helpful, but other records strongly suggest
now that their roots may be more likely in Nottinghamshire as well.
The name seems to be more centred on Nottingham and Derby, rather than Leicestershire.
My mother was a HOLT of Coalville, and her father, Harry, was born in nearby Donington-le-Heath. His father was from Thurlaston, born about 1867. Earlier than that, we've no idea.
It could be that Thurlaston was a brief sojourn south, and they were always
from the Hugglescote area in the first place.

My mother's mother was a MANDERFIELD from the Shepshed area and this name also links back into the CORBETT family history. Any further help there too would be much appreciated.

My father's mother was a SMITH of Aylestone, and because some of Val's FRETTER family are also of the Aylestone and Blaby areas, we wouldn't be surprised if we are also distantly related down our parent's mother's lines. The 1880 census suggests
that their gardens backed onto each others somehow. We feel sure they
would have known of each other. Hope they were friends! Some chance!
My great grandfather, James HAYWOOD, was born in Griffydam in 1875, and he married Edith ISON of Leicester in 1897. Edith was descended from a branch of the HASTINGS family, who were of Humberstone and thence Lutterworth, Welford and then Newark. Their line is well-known and can be traced back to the Middle Ages and Baron William Hastings of Towton Moor fame; there are also links in several places into that line of medieval kings, the Plantagenets, et al.

I reckon that if you are English, on both sides, and can trace that heritage back to the 1800s, then something like a quarter of England's native population also have links somewhere to one or more of the landed gentry families, so also giving them links back to the Plantagenet kings. The proportion is even more likely for those from the south of England and into the midlands, but less likely from Yorkshire, Lancashire, Cumbria and Northumbria - but not impossible. There will be a quite few folks from County Durham who also have Plantagenet ancestry, but not so many as to be found further south.

Likewise, not every English family from Sussex will be certain to have it, but such links are more common there, and all around the Home Counties. When you get back to the 1400s and realise that at that level, we all have several million great grandparents each, it stands to reason that in a country that then only had a population of four or five million people at best, many were related to each other.

Just look at any list of the names of the noble families of England, and realise that between them they had hundreds of daughters, many of whom then married into the commonality, or their daughters and grandaughters did. The numbers of such females then, by the 1800s, runs into many thousands. The trick is finding the records that link to such a line. But it is only one line, there's no money or glory in it. Here's a page with a list of the Elizabethan Peerage on it, look at the wide variety of surnames, and you'll see what I mean. How many daughters and female descendants are there in that lot? With each generation down the line, the likelihood of marrying an ordinary untitled working man gets higher and higher.

Here is a rough list of names I've just extracted from Elizabethan times of first generation surnames that did, somewhere, connect back into the nobility, and thence to royalty. Yes, it's true many of the girls of these families will have married into other noble lines, but that would still then have considerably extended this list. But a good many married into ordinary families, and the next generation likewise. By which time this list of surnames would have doubled if not trebled, and so on down the years.

Audley ~ Berkeley ~ Berners ~ Bindon ~ Blount ~ Bourchier ~ Bradenham ~ Broke ~ Brooke ~ Browne ~ Brydges ~ Buckhurst ~ Butterwick ~ Carey ~ Cecil ~ Cheney ~ Clifford ~ Clinton ~ Cobham ~ Compton ~ Conyers ~ Cromwell ~ Dacre ~ Darcy ~ DeVere ~ Devereux ~ Dudley ~ Eresby ~ Fiennes ~ Fitzalan ~ Gilles ~ Grey ~ Greystoke ~ Hastings ~ Hazelwood ~ Herbert ~ Hornby ~ Howard ~ Hundson ~ Kent ~ Knyvett ~ Latimer ~ Lumley ~ Manners ~ Montague ~ Mordaunt ~ Morley ~ Mounteagle ~ Mountjoy ~ Neville ~ Norreys ~ North ~ Ogle ~ Oughtred ~ Paget ~ Parr ~ Parker ~ Paulet ~ Percy ~ Radcliffe ~ Rich ~ Russell ~ Sackville ~ Sandys ~ Scrope ~ Seymour ~ St.John ~ Stafford ~ Stanley ~ Stourton ~ Stuart ~ Sutton ~ Talbot ~ Toddington ~ Touchet ~ Vaux ~ Vavasour ~ Wentworth ~ West ~ Wharton ~ Willough ~ Willoughby ~ Witton ~ Wriothesley ~ Zouche

Genetic links back to Plantagenets, and so by default, to the Normans, is far more common than most folks think. Just start digging and you'll find them.
Any help on any of my family names above this list would be very much appreciated, and perhaps we could perform a likewise service for someone else - isn't that what the Internet was made for, after all?

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