Case 2

Case study: the value of manorial court records

James Mitton of Hough on the Hill died in 1836 aged 58.  So much was corroborated by his gravestone and burial entry in the church registers and by the probate of his will.   A search of the parish registers proved that he had not been baptized in the same parish where he lived and was buried.  Because he died before the 1851 census there was no easy way of finding out where he was born. The IGI did not include any birth or baptism of a James Mitton born around 1778.  I suspected that he may have been a dissenter.

The only clue was that James appointed his brother Thomas Mitton one of his executors, and Thomas lived in Balderton over the county boundary into Nottinghamshire.   Could this have been the family home?  I searched the registers. Neither James nor Thomas was baptized there either.

 There were wills for two Thomas Mittons living in Balderton, dated 1820 and 1854, and they turned out to be father and son.  The father’s will referred to copyhold property.  Copyhold was tenure at will regulated and recorded in a manorial court.  Since 1926 manorial court records have been protected by law and are often in local archives.   So I consulted the Manorial Documents Register; there was no record for Balderton, but there was for Newark, the nearest town, and they were now in the Nottinghamshire Archives. 

 The manorial court had preserved large volumes of its transactions and its steward had prepared an index.   So I was very quickly able to find every property transaction involving the Mittons and their mother’s family the Parkers, from whom they had inherited their property.  And the earliest reference to Thomas Mitton (the father) identified him as a Servingman living in Cotham.  It was a very tiny parish whose registers were so nearly illegible that it had not been possible to transcribe and index them for the IGI.  But there, on the microfilm, was the entry for James in 1778, and his brothers Thomas and Samuel.

 The manorial court records had provided vital clues to identify James’s birthplace.  They also told much of the poignant story of his mother’s family.  She had had two brothers; one married and built up a property including an Inn on the Great North Road, but had no children and died before his own father; the other brother also married but soon afterwards joined the local regiment which was called to fight the rebels in America in 1776 – he died fighting. So she and her husband came to inherit all the family property.  

 Without using the manorial records, the only way to have found James’s birthplace and parentage would have been a meticulous parish-by-parish search.  As it was over the county boundary, it might have been a long time before the correct parish was looked at.  Family history can be much, more than births, marriages and deaths: spread your net wider and cast it deeper.

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