This family tree starts in Wirksworth, Derbyshire, England, in the 1660s with the marriage of a Robert Byard to Anne Fletcher. Ince's Pedigrees show this marriage as having taken place on April 14 1669. Before this date we have been unable to find any documented evidence of the Byards in the Wirksworth area. However there is evidence of Byards in other areas of England before this time, e.g. at Ripley, Ashby, Doncaster, Mancetter, London and Lincoln. How the Byards came to Wirksworth we do not know for sure, but from then on we have been able to trace the family line and establish the tree which is represented below. In establishing a family tree such as this from church records and wills and with the help of a considerable number of people there will inevitably be occasional errors. If any such errors are seen please let us know.
The initial part of the tree, i.e. the children of Robert Byard and Anne causes some disquiet in that there appear to be two families rather than one recorded here, since the children occur over quite a large span of time and there are wills for two Robert Byards (see the Wills section), one of whom died in 1703 and the other in 1674. The earlier will gives no indication of any children, but the later one provides evidence of five children still being alive at the time the will was written, as well as Robert's wife Anne.
We also have quite a considerable part of the tree which is not represented, in that although we are sure there is a connection we have been unable to establish it with any certainty, and at the moment this remains a puzzle. It concerns a Jedidiah Byard (1820-1856) who married Mary Hickling September 30th. 1840 and then after the birth of their first child, Mary Ann, christened on December 13th. 1840, they went to the US. We know that his father was a John Byard who lived in theWirksworth area, but we can find no record of Jedidiah's birth, hence we cannot attribute him to a particular John Byard. Our guess is that he was an illegitimate child, but of this we cannot be sure, so any help or opinion would be gratefully accepted, particularly by the US descendants of Jedidiah...of which there are many!
The most common surnames in this database (in no particular order) are : Gibson(21), Brittain(27), Byard(637), Taylor(46), Warrington(26), Ryan(20), Powell(24), Smith(20), Redfearn(21), Pattullo(24)