Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Scottish Records Online - 1797 Horse Tax

It has been about three years since I put a transcription of the 1797 horse tax for the Pairh of Urr in Kirkcudbright on a website. Today I have discovered that the horse tax lists for the entire country have been digitized and is now online. There is no searchable index. The images of the lists can be downloaded or saved. The lists are organized by county and then by parish. The name of the man who had the horses is recorded as well as how many horses he had and how much tax was paid. It also records the name of the land or estate that he occupied. Typically parish registers do not record the estate a family lived on. The horse tax is one source of many that one would put on his or her list to look at while at the National Archives. Also on this website is a record of all land owners in Scotland in 1872. I look forward to more records being put online. The guide for these little known or used records is the book, Tracing Your Scottish Ancestors.
At ScotlandPeoples website the probate indexes are available to 1900. They just put Catholic records on their website. The price to access these records is very reasonable and sometimes free. The record that I think would be of most value will be the militia lists created prior to and during the Napoleonic Wars (1800 to 1815). Kirkcudbrightshire has milita records that cover most parishes in the county. I have put the parish of Urr militia records online

Sunday, April 18, 2010

Flory's in Tattingstone

I have been attempting to assemble some of the Flory families in the Clopton and Burgh area of Suffolk. There are just enough of them to cause some confusion since there were 7 brothers marrying in the mid 1700’s, namely ; Richard, John, Isaac, William, Benjamin, Jonathan, and Thomas. As the generations continued they had a tendency to use the same given names. I have identified 27 of their children. There could be as many as 15 more that I have not found yet, because the parish records provide little identifying information. Much of the research is based on the assertion that families lived in the same parish for many generations. When a family moved some parishes or miles from where they were born it becomes a bit more difficult to identify them. I found a marriage of Jonathan Flory to Elizabeth Smyth in 1778 in Tattingstone. This marriage record states that Jonathan is from Clopton. They went on to have 10 children in Clopton. Tattingstone is about 10 miles south of Clopton on the other side of Ipswich. Susan the sister of Jonathan died in Tattingstone in 1795. I know this for certain because in a rare instance of record keeping the burial record records her father’s name and mothers maiden name; Jonathan Flory and Mary Abbot. I found 2 families in Tattiingstone that could have a connection to Clopton. There was a Thomas born about 1752 and one about 1757. Their children were born between 1786 and 1802. There is a headstone and will for the Thomas that died in 1812. It is the other Thomas that died in 1810 at the age of 53 that appears to have a connection to Clopton. His birth year of 1757 fits with being a son of Jonathan Flory and Mary Abbot. He married Sarah Potter in 1784 in Tattingstone. He named a daughter Ursula. The fact that two other family members have been identified there and his birth year fits; and Ursula is a family name points to him being from Clopton. The parish registers of Clopton has a Thomas born in 1755 and 1758. It appears that Sarah Bobbit married the Thomas born in 1755 who is the son of Benjamin and Elizabeth Flory. As I looked through the Bishop Transcripts of Tattingstone I seen a number of Abbots’s, so it appears that Mary Abbot may have been the connection to Tattingstone to begin with.