Earlier this year I discovered that my ancestor Mary Dunnell, the woman known to Parson James Woodforde as 'Mrs Dunnell', was born Mary Ingledow - she married Barnabas Duning at St Martin at Oak church in Norwich on 27 April 1740 (thanks, IGI); in her will she referred to herself as Mary Dunnell alias Dunning.
Ingledow isn't exactly an everyday, next door neighbour type name. It's the sort of name you'd need to spell every time you apply for something over the phone...so I thought it might be easier to find the family than if they were Smiths or Browns. Hmmm.
My father and I spent a few days in Norfolk last spring - mainly riding on steam trains, supping ale and enjoying fish & chips. We also spent some time in the Norfolk Record Office where the friendly staff steered us through the catalogue towards a big bundle of documents that related to the property and land owned by our ancestors in Weston Longville. Seeing Mary Dunnell's signature (below) on documents she would have handled and been directly affected by made me really want to find out more about her.
The Weston records reveal that in 1727, Ursula Engledow (the spelling in record sources varies, with Engledow and Ingledow being interchangeable) was buried. The register says she was the daughter of Thomas and Bridget Ingledow while the Archdeacon's Transcripts provided more, saying she was the daughter of Bridget Ingledow of Hethersett. How was she linked to my Mary?Today, I found out! A search at FreeReg revealed that my Mary was baptised at Hethersett in 1720, five years after her twin sisters Ursula (the girl buried at Weston in 1727) and Bridget (who grew up to marry Stephen Andrews from Weston then cooper William Ames), and three years after a brother called Thomas. Her parents, Thomas Ingledow and Bridget Gowing, married at St Stephen's church in Norwich in 1714. (Some 195 years later I worked at M&S next door!)
This fits in with evidence from the Weston Alderham Court Roll of 1737 which states that William and Ursula Lyng surrendered their cottage and 1.5 acres of land to Bridget Ingledow: Ursula was the widow of Thomas Ingledow (and mother of Thomas baptised 1691 at Lyng, whom I now believe grew up to marry Bridget Gowing) and had married William Lyng in 1707 at Weston. So, Bridget Gowing Ingledow inherited her mother in law's Weston's home and land, which I presume was part of an Ingledow legacy. This means my ancestors were living in Weston for several generations longer than I had been able to prove thus far. Hurrah!
So...Thomas Ingledow married Ursula (surname unknown, the next challenge!) and had several children in Lyng including Thomas in 1691, before moving to neighbouring Weston by 1694. Thomas (senior) died and his widow Ursula married William Lyng in 1707, while Thomas (junior) married Bridget Gowing in Norwich in 1714 and had a family in Hethersett before moving to Weston by the 1720s ('people didn't move much in the olden days' = myth) - where Thomas died in 1734 and Bridget died in 1753.
That means that my great x5 grandmother, Mary Dunnell born in 1742 and later married to shoemaker and parish clerk John Bates, would have known and grown up near (or with) her grandmother Bridget. It's that kind of generational overlap that makes me wonder whether Mary, when she became a grandmother in the 1790s, thought back to her childhood and told her grandchildren stories about her own grandmother.
I feel lucky that my I was able to hear first hand stories from my grandpa's cousin Kath, born 1904, which had been told to her as a small child by her grandfather (he died in 1909) which related to his own grandfather and that family's lucky escape from being caught poaching. I got tales straight from the 18th century!
What sort of stories would Mary Dunnell Bates have told her Bates grandsons, John (b1794) and Thomas (b1796) as they sat on her lap or round her fire?
Woodforde's Mrs Dunnell is well documented in his diaries, and now I feel I know a little more about her - her birthplace, her birth year, her parents' and siblings' names - adding some depth to another generation on the tree.
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