Mediaeval Hundlebys

'HUNDELBYS'

I've found that the above spelling is worth using in a Google search for the name. Not only is the name often misspelled - I do it myself - but it appears to have been the standard form up to the 1500s. I suppose it has to do with 'Hundulf'.

I see that John (or Johannes) Hundelby, a 'carvour', was admitted as a freeman of York in 1423.

Robert Hundelby registered a will in Lambeth in 1406, leaving most of his money to his father and mother (John and Cecilie), who lived in Alford.

And going further back, Ralph de Hundelby, of Benington, received a 'lay subsidy' of 11d in about 1332. Benington, of course, is only a few miles from Butterwick, my own ancestral home.

A trip to Boston

Every now and again, my sister and I meet in Boston for lunch, with varying numbers of Hundleby family members. Boston is equidistant between our homes in Lincoln and Peterborough, and as our Aunt Kath lives there it is convenient for her to come along.

It was rather sad yesterday that since we last got together, we had lost our Aunt Lynne, our mother’s sister, and Herb, our step-father.

Carolyn and I always take a bus from Lincoln. It takes an hour and a half, but I always enjoy the journey, because the bus’s route is not along main roads but through a succession of villages and landscapes.

We climb up the Lincoln Edge towards Metheringham and then down towards the fens. At this stage the narrow roads bend and wind through woods and stone buildings, and I always wonder if we aren’t just going a little too fast. When we emerge onto the long straight roads towards Kirkstead, the deep dykes either side look like another accident waiting to happen.

We pass through Woodhall Spa, whose waters cured my mother-in-law of arthritis and where my great-uncle owned one of his shops. It’s now known as the refuge of the rich and retired, recently in the news for opposing a chicken farm. It has a delightful cinema, located in the woods (hence its name ‘Kinema in the Woods), the only one in the country, I believe, where the image is projected from behind the screen.

Before long we are in Tattershall, home of the Castle and the church where 'Tom Thumb' is buried.

I was always told that on a clear day you could see both Lincoln Cathedral and Boston Stump from the top of the castle and I’m happy to report that it’s quite true.

On to Coningsby, home of the Battle of Britain Memorial flight.

Well over halfway now. All around are vast fields, empty in January, dotted with idle tractors. Sometimes in the middle of them, a mile away, is a farmhouse, with barns and other buildings, set in a grove of trees.

Along the road are several isolated chapels, Methodist, Primitive Methodist and Baptist. Lines of windbreaking poplars, signs to places like Dogdyke, Gypsey Bridge, Scrub Hill, Cowbridge, Anton’s Gowt, even New York. I see we have turned out of ‘Hundlehouse Lane’.

We come a behind a typical Lincolnshire driver, ambling along at just below 40 mph, oblivious to the impatient bus tailgating him. We overtake eventually and as we take a bend at 60 I think we’re in the hands of the other variety of typical Lincolnshire driver.

But we arrive, safe and sound, and I’m all set to interrogate my aunt about the family, and listen to my sister reminding everyone how awful big brother was to her.

I wonder if it was sensible to invite her join this blog.

Random Stuff

Some photos of my son, David, testing himself in the Lincoln 10k last year. Any resemblance to anyone out there?

http://www.everybodysmile.biz/cgi-bin/public.cgi?form_status=emailfriend&event_id=28021&photo_id=322&img=10KP4522{1030.jpg&ss=&sk=1030

A Hildred Connection

It was very interesting to see you mention the name Hildred, Roger as a Hildred did marry into the Hundelby family. Matilda (Tillie) Hundleby of Hemingby, daughter of Samuel and Elizabeth, married James Hildren on Oct. 8, 1898. He was 24 years old, living at 75 Burgfield Street, London and was was a Porter with the GN Railway. His father, Thomas, was deceased. He and Tillie lived at 25 New End Road, Hemingby and Mildred's parents lived at #10 and her brother, John at #19. My Dad remembered Aunt Tille and Uncle Jim and evidently he was a very jolly sort of person (at least to an 8 or 9 year old boy)

The Lincolnshire Village

I have a friend in Lincoln, Ken by name. He was 65 the other day and was born and bred in the city.

He's a man who seems to know everybody and it's amazing how he can find a link between newcomers and people he already knows. Another friend returned to Lincoln from New Zealand and Australia after nearly 10 ten years and tried to look me up. He went to a pub where I used to be a regular a decade ago and asked after me. The one barmaid left from those days said, 'He doesn't come here anymore - he think he drinks in Wetherspoon's.' So he went there and was told, 'He usually comes in at 1 o'clock.' And sure enough I did. You can't have secrets in this place.

I introduced Dave to Ken and of course, though they'd never met, they had lots of people in common.

The same thing happened when Ken and I were talking to one of the barmaids in Wetherspoon's (this is the Ritz, formerly a cinema) and when she mentioned her surname, he was bound to know someone with the same name. 'Hildred' was the name, and I thought I knew it too.

'I'm sure I know that name from Boston,' I said, and wasn't surprised to hear that, yes, there were lots of Hildreds there. But I was sure I'd heard the name from one of my relatives. I had a feeling that a Hildred had been a local councillor when I was growing up. And after checking on the net I found I was right. Councillor John (Jack) Hildred had been Mayor of Boston from 1979-80.

And what's more he'd come from Benington, and that was my connection, because my step-father, Herb, came from Benington (a few miles north of Boston) and knew Jack.

Herbert Millard was a close friend of my father, Ernest, and stood as his best man. At the time he was 'courting' my mother's sister, Nellie, but that never came to anything. After my father died, Herb, himself a widower, married my mother. Herb was another man who lived and died in the same place and seemed to know everybody in Boston.

He died just over two years ago. While he was in hospital, Nellie herself died.

Names

I once worked for a year for the local office of the Department of Work and Pensions, the Records department. It was pretty routine and I spent my day filing large folders of personal information on long racks of shelving.

For someone interested in names, though, it was fascinating. There was the usual character who had changed his name to Elvis Presley – ever town has at least one – as well as problems deciding which part of a Muslim or Sikh name counts as the surname and the frequent mixing up of ‘Macs’ and ‘Mcs’.

I found somebody once whose surname was ‘De La Pole’. I informed my colleagues, who by now were used to my eccentricities, that if Richard III had not killed at Bosworth, murdered as I see it, the throne of England might have passed to the De La Pole who was the son of Richard’s sister.

I used to say that the records were a marvellous resource for students researching surname distribution throughout the country. And the section devoted to Retirement Pensioners would have been useful to anyone interested in the changing fashions in first names. I remember all the seventy year-old women called Rose, Pearl, Doris, Iris, Mavis – flowers, jewels, birds, nymphs, etc. And of course, names from the Bible were once very popular.

I think perhaps the most popular woman’s name seventy years ago was ‘May’, but oddly seldom as a first name. I was usually added to another, Daisy May, Sarah May, Laura May, etc. (Pause for ribald jokes).

I was thinking about this when I was perusing one of the charts Susan sent me.

I was particularly intrigued by Thomas and Ruth (b 1794 and 1795).

Apart from names, I noticed first that Thomas seems to have been a posthumous son, born (or baptised?) in 1795, the year after John died.

Thomas, unlike his father, lived to a ripe old age, as did his wife Ruth, 87 and 79 respectively. Maybe this is because they were country folk, plenty of fresh air and hard work, partly protected from the diseases of the towns. No doubt their food was plain and simple, with plenty of vegetables, if not fruit. Lincolnshire people, however poor, have usually had plenty to eat.

I wonder if they were even then god-fearing people, forswearing drink and tobacco, although I find it difficult to imagine Thomas without a pipe.

And then there are all those children, the last, Samuel being born when Ruth was 46. Another lesson there in longevity, perhaps. Samuel himself lived to be 80. He and his father spanned three centuries, just.

It’s interesting that they had two sons called Joseph. I assume this is because the first died. I hadn’t noticed people doing this before except in mediaeval royal families. I think Edward III lost children and later gave their name to another child. As I recall, he and also King John used to use the same names for their illegitimate children, so that they had two or more families growing up in parallel.

The names Thomas gave to his children are all pretty standard for the times and are not uncommon today. I wonder if Princes William and Henry will lead a revival of those names, which oddly were the names of Thomas’ first two sons. His daughters were Sarah, Susanna and Ann, names still in use, with variants.

Only Cornelius is intriguing. I wonder if anyone knows why it was chosen. Did Thomas like classical history and read about the Punic Wars? Has it been passed down like so many Hundleby Christian names?

Note: Susan tells me that the name 'Cornelius' seems to have been introduced as a Hundleby name from Ruth's family, the Bradleys, as were Susanna and Nathaniel, both Biblical names. But no-one seems to know why Cornelius was chosen originally.

Away from Thomas I notice a use of mother’s maiden names being used as forenames. Bennett Warren Hundleby, for example, and Stanley Truman Hundleby sound very American. I named my own first son, James, Barrett, after his mother, but that was done in conscious imitation.

Interesting link:

http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=184

Luke's family

Roger talks about widening the gene pool, so here's a little background to my husband's family. Luke's father Max Hundleby (author of 'The German A7V Tank') was born in Hogsthorpe, Lincolnshire.

Max's father, William Henry Hundleby was a third generation Lincolnshire thresher. As well as being threshers the family designed and built their own elevators. Max went to University in Hull to study engineering, and met his wife Mary, who was born and brought up in Normanton, South Yorkshire. The couple settled in Lancashire where their two sons Luke and Giles were born and educated.

Luke married me, the daughter of a Shropshire man and a Yorkshire lass, whilst Giles married Kathryn, who comes from the Bristol area. How about that for branching out across England? Giles is an engineer as well, so one could say that the engineering gene has survived five generations and the move away from Lincolnshire.

Last time I blogged I talked about the dangers of Lincolnshire's roads. I have to say that the dangers are real. There are usually about a hundred people killed every year in accidents, usually through sheer idiocy. A few years ago my cousin's husband was killed on Christmas Eve by someone pulling out onto a main road and more recently my wife's nephew was killed when the man giving him a lift decided to overtake on a bend and hit a lorry head-on.

At least three of my mother's brothers had serious motorbike accidents, one of them almost fatal. It's one of my earliest memories, my mother's father appearing at the house to tell us about Uncle Dick. It's funny, it was always my father who was needed when there was a problem of some sort.

I wanted to talk about widening the gene pool as well, especially my own contribution.

My first wife was Shirley, Shirley Anne in fact, named so because her father was a fan of Shirley Anne Field, perhaps best known for Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.

Shirley's father was Bill, son of a Lt-commander in the Royal Navy. I don't know whether was a regular sailor, but he certainly served in the Navy during the war. I believe he sailed in The Hood, but fortunately was transferred before she met The Bismarck. It seems that he met my mother-in-law while stationed in the Navy base at Scapa Flow in the Orkneys, for she is an Orkadian. Incidentally, Orkadians are not Scottish, whatever region of the UK the civil servants place them in, and always vote against 'Scottish' independence or devolution when given the opportunity. It's back to the Viking heritage.

My second wife, Carolyn, is the product of a Lincolnshire woman (surname Louth) and Cecil Bower. She met Cecil in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) during the war. Cecil, obviously named after Rhodes, had grown up in Mozambique. His family's name had originally been 'Bauer', having come from the Alsace-Lorraine region on the border of France and Germany. During the First World War they anglicised their name, just like the Mountabttens (from Battenberg) and King George V himself.

Not a bad mix, in all.

Lincolnshire comes in for a lot of bad press. Not only are its roads are among the most dangerous in England, it has also been voted (unaccountably) the fourth most unattractive county in the land. Grantham is famously the most boring town and Boston has the fattest, the laziest, the most racially bigoted and most promiscuous population in the country.

It's also a common calumny on Lincolnshire folk that we - how can I put this delicately? - that we,when marrying, do not take sufficient steps to broaden the gene pool. Only the other day, I heard this repeated on a blog written by a football supporter who is working his way through all the other sides in his own team's division, including Lincoln and Boston. To be fair, he said the same thing about Cambridgeshire.

Well, it's not true of my family.

My father, Ernie, came from Butterwick, five miles north of Boston off the Skegness road. My mother was born in Fishmere End, which is somewhere near Kirton, five miles south of Boston, on the Spalding road.

Fishmere End is not a village. It's an area on the map and consists of vegetable fields, the odd house and a dyke (in Lincs that's a drain, not a mound as in Holland or a levee as in the US). Before WW2 it was the kind of area where the boys were let off school in the autumn term to help with the harvest.

My mother's father was called Walter Moses and worked for a local farmer. I think he reached the rank of foreman because the 'tied cottage' he lived in was, to my young eyes, a real farmhouse, complete with barns and greenhouses. The barn was full of items which served my grandfather in his on-the-side buying and selling business. He was a short but rather fearsome man, with a thick leather belt, which he was not afraid to use on his children when they strayed from the straight and narrow.

He also drank his tea from his saucer and seemed to strain it through his moustache as he did so.

He served in the artillery in the First World War and once gave me his tin hat. Being a silly little boy, I didn't take care of it and a precious family heirloom is now lost.

He had five sons: Walt, Joe, George (known as Podge), Dick and Frank. They all went on to agricultural work and lived in villages like Wrangle, Heckington and Donington. They were all typical south Lincolnshire men, taciturn, close and hard. My first wife could hardly understand a word they said, partly because of their broad accent, partly because their pipe never left their mouth.

Their education was poor and my father would often be asked to write letters for them or fill in their tax returns. But they were no fools. When it came to money they were very shrewd. And they would have nothing to do with credit. I remember that when my grandfather retired, my father persuaded him to buy a bungalow. He accompanied him through the whole process and when the solicitor asked him about the method of payment, my grandfather produced a wad of notes from his back pocket and counted out £1,000 in notes. That was in 1964.

My mother's sister, Nellie, was to my young eyes, very glamorous. She married Leslie Henshaw, the brother (I think) of Alex Henshaw, well-known as a pre-war aviator and Spitfire test pilot. He ran a holiday park near Mablethorpe (Trusville). When they married he renamed Nellie as Lynn.

I've often wondered about the name 'Moses'. My mother used to tell me, when I was growing up, that it was a good thing we'd won the war. Whatever my mother's origins I always like to claim Jewish blood, along with the Viking strain. When you are known as a librarian,you need something exotic to boast about.

I'll write about my own attempts to widen the gene pool next time.

Canadian Connections

How did Hundleby members get to Canada and why.

Ellen Hundleby, daughter of Samuel the Preacher was born in Hemingby 14 May 1879. She married Valentine Edmund Mackinder on Dec. 25, 1899 at Horncastle. They had the following children: Frederick and Edmund, identical twins born Oct. 23, 1900 at 41 North Street, Horncastle; Nellie born 3 March 1903; Grace born 4 March 1906 died 22 Oct. 1906; Kathleen born 3 Feb. 1908.

Ellen was not that healthy a person and in 1909 the Doctor recommended that they find a drier climate. As Valentine had a friend, Joe Walkey, who had been an apprentice butcher with him, they decided to come to Canada to Cranbrook, British Columbia where Joe lived. They had considered South Africa and Australia but chose the wettest and dampest place!

After a very stormy 8-day crossing on the S.S. Laurentic, the family arrived in Quebec City on Oct. 23, 1910 the twins' 10th birthday. They then took a 5 day trip across Canada by train. Life was not easy for them, and their daughter, Kathleen, died 15 Nov. 1910 in Jaffray, B.C. The doctor listed her death as from Marasmus, which was basically malnutrition due to a protein difficiency in the diet.

They then moved to Qualicum Beach on Vancouver Island, becoming part of the group of first homesteaders on the townsite, Valentine building his Butcher Shop on 2nd Ave and homesteading 5 acres further out. They lived in a tent. Ellen, however, was diagnosed with T.B., so they moved again to Kamloops in the interior of the Province in the year 1918. This is a very dry semi-arid desert area. However, it was to be too late for the improvement of her health. Ellen died in Kamloops 17 Dec. 1922.