|
|
|
|
You all know that
feeling that you get when you’ve been researching a particular family for a
while – it gets personal! When you can’t find Great-great-grandmother on
the census, you wonder if she was being deliberately evasive, and when you
finally find that ‘missing’ baptism, you feel like reaching back into history
and kissing her! Perhaps that’s why so many of us end up referring to our
favourites by pet names, just as we would with an old friend. I know it
tickled me when my recently-discovered cousin Janet referred to our mutual
ancestors William and Rebecca WATTON (nee CORBIN) as ‘Billy and Becky’ and
now that’s how I think of them too. Billy and Becky
married in the bride’s home parish of West Parley in Dorset on 31 October
1774. William had been over the border in the Hampshire parish of Ringwood,
but it was at West Parley that the couple baptised their first child, Debra,
although the other four (Rebeckca, William and two Richards) were baptised at
Holdenhurst in Hampshire. Debra seems to have died in infancy, as did the
first of the two Richards, and Rebeckca stayed single, dying in 1838.
William, however, married Sarah SHAVE in 1810 and went on to have several
children. And the surviving Richard married Maria COLLINS in 1812 and they
went on to have 13 children, all but one of them surviving into adulthood and
at least nine of them known to have had children. This means that if your
surname is WATTON and you are living in or around modern-day Bournemouth, you
have a fair chance of being descended from Billy and Becky. If you are a
Ringwood WATTON, you may well be connected to Billy further back, although
we’re still untangling the precise relationships between the early WATTONs in
Ringwood, Christchurch, Milton and Hampreston. We have lots of
information on the various branches of Billy and Becky’s family, so if you
think there’s a chance you’re related, please contact me by clicking here. |
