Trist Families of Devon: Volume 1 Research Methods: Trist Families of Devon, #1

By Peter Trist

This series of e-Books will chiefly be of interest to family historians with Devon ancestry. This first volume gives an account of the research methods used in building up the history of a mostly obscure family previously known mainly from parish registers and muster rolls.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Peter Trist
• Release date: Nov 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9780648499114

Book preview

GENERAL PREFACE TO THE SERIES

This is the first in a series attempting to write a social history of Trist families in Devon. Most volumes in the series are devoted to farming and village life within their contemporary framework of religion, politics and trade in the Tudor, Stuart and Georgian eras (roughly from 1530 to 1830). Nearly all English-speaking families today would have had many forbears who followed a similar way of life in a rural community.

For most families, this rural way of life did not long outlive the Industrial Revolution. The period after 1830 often involved emigration from Devon) to industrial or urbanized areas of England (like my own forbears). Others went overseas and I have connected these emigrant families to their Devon roots, in a later volume. The last volumes in the series contain technical information, charts and indexes.

Amateur historians have many varied and personal reasons for starting a family history. My own motivation has been simply to satisfy my curiosity. How did each generation of my forbears live their lives? Discovering each link in the chain and joining them together into a coherent narrative, from past to present, has motivated my writing of this family history.

My motivation owes very little to genetics because a surname is a legal not a biological construct. I cannot claim any close genetic connection with any of my ancestors except perhaps my parents. Modern biological science tells us that the gene pool is halved with each passing generation, roughly every twenty-five years. Consequently, even my paternal grandfather is seventy-five per cent biologically different from myself, even though the male surname remains unchanged. After only one hundred years, or three generations, the resemblance is down to about twelve per cent. By the fourth generation what remains of the original gene pool is so negligible that one’s ancestors should really be considered as genetic strangers. My genetic similarity to Richard Trist, my great-great-great grandfather born in 1763 is theoretically a mere three per cent, so that he is genetically quite a different person, as his facial appearance in his portrait suggests. Any biological resemblance we may have is insignificant and roughly equivalent to my thirty-one other forbears of the same vintage from whom I am also descended, most of whom I have not identified. For this reason, we cannot really claim an identity with our ancestors on a biological basis. The idea that one can inherit a blood-line is illusory: a mirage created linguistically by the inherited surname.

Whilst a one-name study is largely independent of genetics, it is a lot more relevant when considered from a social and local point of view. Suppose that I could investigate the lives of all thirty-one of my other forbears back to 1763. What would I find? In all probability, their social histories would be remarkably similar to those of the Trist families described in these volumes. Most people in the pastoral age married (and were usually obliged by community pressure to marry) within their own social class and did not generally move very far away from their parents’ parish.1 There was considerably less social and geographical mobility than there is today. Consequently, the experiences of one family would be subject to the same influences as other families belonging to the same social class living in the same region at the same time.

In this sense, a family history is really a branch of local or parochial history. Any generalizations that can be made, apply mainly in the local area or region. A family history establishes two facts basic to any history, namely a time and a place. Knowing where an ancestor was at a particular time supplies a focus and narrows the range of possibilities. For example, the acquisition and disposal of leasehold farms by tenant farmers was of enormous importance to the farming families examined in this history. This is a topic which would probably only be investigated by a family or local historian. Likewise, the details of the rise and fall in the fortunes of this or that branch of the Trist family is of less importance than recording what windows of opportunity were opening and closing at the local level. These opportunities and problems were similar for contemporary families from the same social class living in the Dart Valley or South Hams regions of Devon.

Journeying into a family’s past is like travelling to a foreign country: it satisfies the desire to discover and explore. Our ancestors had some beliefs and values which seem very strange to us. Beliefs and values have changed with the times. One example would be the importance of the rigid religious doctrines espoused by the church. The church insisted that the earth was the centre of the universe and that mankind was the result of a single act of divine creation. To believe and promote anything else (for example that the earth revolved around the sun) was heresy punished by a painful death.2

Another contrast with twenty-first century values would be the legal and social status of women which until recently was eclipsed by that of men. And I shudder when I recall that there was a bull ring at Totnes where the suffering of the chained-up animal was a public spectacle which people would pay to witness. Curiosity about these many contrasts has driven my attempt to rediscover the lost world of my ancestors.

In researching my family history, I was also motivated by my curiosity about the history of England. I wanted to know where my ancestors were living and what they were doing when certain significant events occurred in English history. For example, what was their attitude towards the Protestant Reformation from the 1530s onwards? Where were they and what were they doing in 1588 when the Armada appeared in the English Channel? To what extent were they drawn into the Civil War in the 1640s and were they ever likely to have been conscripted to fight and if so on whose side? How were they affected when Napoleon’s Continental System closed Europe to English trade between 1803 and 1815? How rapidly and to what extent did the Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century change their traditional way of life?

After discovering that my ancestors had lived in Devon for many generations, I read Hoskins’ Devon which led me to ask questions from a more local point of view. Where were the farms of my ancestors? How deeply were they involved with Devon’s woollen textile industry as clothiers? How did they fit into Devon’s triangular trade between its own textile industry, the Newfoundland fishery and the Iberian Peninsula?

On a more personal level I wanted to know how generation after generation of my forbears managed their affairs in their different social and economic world. We are living through an era launched in the nineteenth century by the industrial revolution. As a consequence, we have largely lost touch with country life. What preceded this urbanised way of living was the long period of the pastoral age which was dominated by farming the land. And I felt that by resurrecting the lives and times of my ancestors in this history, I was repaying a debt of gratitude. And perhaps my deep subconscious mind wishes to leave something tangible relating to the family. For I have no children yet each generation of my forbears nurtured and brought up their children no doubt at considerable sacrifice to themselves. I felt it was a type of gratitude to be curious about their lives and to find out about each generation as they travelled towards the present.

No account of my motivation for writing this family history would be complete without saying more about the influence of W.G. Hoskins. In persevering with a history of the Trist family I drew inspiration from Hoskins’ histories of Devon and its landscape. Whenever my motivation flagged, which was often, I could always obtain new energy by browsing through the gazetteer section of Devon in which he describes every parish in the county. It was always a pleasure to spend happy hours wandering through the Devon lanes with Hoskins as my guide, reminding me constantly that ‘detailed local knowledge and research is a prerequisite for understanding the broader sweeps of landscape history’.3 Hoskins had a genius for ‘enlarging our historical consciousness from one particular place’. In the Introduction to the 1992 commemorative edition of Devon by Hoskins’ colleague, Peter Beacham, added that any of Hoskins’ entries in the gazetteer are ‘indelibly stamped with his personality, not infrequently, with his forthright views’.4 The Victorian ‘restoration’ of the church at Harberton is one such forthright entry with its dry humour for the reader to savour and all the more so for knowing who the restorer was.5

Hoskins was buoyed by the presence of his own ancestors in Devon history saying that they were men and women who achieved no particular eminence. Most of them were farmers until the abolition of agricultural protection led to the collapse of farming communities all over England and emigration to industrial cities or the wide lands of the New World. But he valued his forbears and claimed that they brought an irreplaceable stability to Devon society.6

As I discovered more about my own ancestors, ordinary people for the most part, I came to realize that each one, either individually or in groups, represented themes in Devon’s overall history. They all lived in Devon and were greatly influenced by it. Of course, I had only researched one family tree as a one-name study but in a sense this random microcosm is actually representative of the whole county. It has only required minimal pruning and shaping to produce a recognizable outline of Devonian history in what might be called a bonsai history: a history in miniature.

Hoskins says that Devon is a county ‘full of zealous antiquaries’ and although I live in Australia, I can now claim to be one of them. Fortunately, all that is required to join this regiment of chroniclers is persistence (in my case for forty years) and old age. Hoskins said that Devon antiquaries lived to a great age, ‘somewhere just short of ninety’.7 And at my age I have not so very far to go, so this work must be printed, because as Hoskins has warned us, antiquarians of local and family history have been known to die leaving behind a collection of unpublishable notes.

There has been no time to write and edit a shorter, concise book so this family history must be printed as it is, in its present unwieldy form of multiple volumes. It will cover the following topics:

• Research Methods

• Origins of the Surname

• The Medieval period

• Forbears: Their Farms & Sidelines

• Their Farmhouses

• The Farming Calendar

• Family Life in a Farming Community

• Local Gentry & Country Parsons

• Politics & Trade of Devon

• Farewell to Devon: Emigration & Urbanisation (Including Overseas Families Charts 5-9 & Notes)

• Selected Documents, Wills & Court Cases

• Indexes and Unresearched Family Groups (UFGs)

CHAPTER 1

THE TASKS OF THE FAMILY HISTORIAN

Writing any history is difficult but writing family history is especially laborious because the primary sources are so thin and so scattered. Most people in history never expected to have books written about them and my ancestors were no exception. They left virtually no written account of their activities and I have had to hunt for those official parish documents which recorded their existence in their basic rites of passage: their baptisms, marriages and burials. Many parish and court records have been lost and many more damaged by war, water, fire or hungry mice.8

The first and most laborious task of a family historian is that of a chronicler or antiquarian: namely to bring these scattered documents together and make an accurate record.

The second task is to make sense of a great deal of fragmentary primary source material by carefully filling in and bridging the numerous gaps in the written record. This is a tricky business and the reasoning behind each deduction needs to be spelt out explicitly. This is very time consuming. A single deduction can take several pages of argument to establish.

The family historian’s third task is thankfully more interesting, less like that of a chronicler and more like the work of a social historian. It is to work out what kinds of activities and routines one’s forbears would have followed in their daily life. I have attempted to place my forbears in their social setting. For me, this forms the central interest of the history and deals with details of the farms, housing, the work and life of farming in Devon and family life in a village and farming community.

A fourth task concerns those institutions and dominant people in the local community whose actions would have had a direct influence on the lives of one’s forbears. In the villages of the pastoral age these influential authorities were the church and the local landowning gentry. For an ancestor to have a kinsman in these influential sectors of society probably made it easier to acquire a lease or make a living. Fortunately for them, there were some Trist men in both the church and among the gentry class. This has made it possible to write about the role of the clergy and gentry using local Trist men as examples.

The fifth area of investigation is perhaps the most interesting of all: to work out how events of national political and economic importance affected the lives of one’s ancestors. One of the most important bread-and-butter issues for everyone in this history was the overall economic development of Devon. I have examined this in detail and tried to assess its bearing on my ancestors’ lives.

My forbears would also have been dramatically affected by major events in English history: by the lawlessness and religious mind-set of the late middle-ages (1350-1485) culminating in the War of the Roses, by the convulsions of the English civil war in Devon (1643-1649) and by the drawn-out evolution of a constitutional monarchy (1660-1714). These historic developments, along with military emergencies, like the coming of the Spanish Armada, are discussed progressively in several volumes.

CHAPTER 2

THE LIMITATIONS OF FAMILY HISTORY

It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all. 9

One of the main limitations of a family history is the scarcity of records which document the lives of our forbears. Tax records, muster rolls and the parish registers are virtually the only sources of information which record their existence. It wasn’t until 1836 that there was a system of universal registration of births, marriages and deaths.

Nowhere are the records less satisfactory than in recording the lives of women. Upon marriage the wife lost not only her property but her maiden name as well. Marriage records, which usually mention the bride’s surname, are not infrequently missing from the parish records. Consequently, it is not uncommon for the wife’s maiden name to be impossible to trace and likewise for her own parents and siblings to remain unknown. Whilst focusing on our unusual surname has made my research task a lot easier, it also threatened to obscure the importance of women in family life and the farming economy.

Another serious methodological limitation is the scarcity of journals and diaries written by members of the yeoman class. This family history mainly relates to people from the plebeian section of society with a restricted view of education. Most plebeian families either did not leave written records about their lives or at least did not preserve them. The few farmers’ diaries which have survived were, with one possible exception, all written by men.10 What the goodwives thought of their lives will possibly never be known.

But this is not a weakness peculiar to family history. As feminists are quick to point out, western history in general is heavily biased in favour of the male gender. The epigraph which heads this chapter is an example of this bias. Dr Johnson was comparing a dog walking on its hind legs to a woman preaching in church, something of which he strongly disapproved. Women were excluded by custom from the grammar schools and by law from the universities. Clearly they did not have much of a future in the Georgian church.

But of course women’s role in the farm economy was of great importance to yeoman families. The goodwife was essential to the economy of the farm and vital to the well-being of the family. Additionally, at least half of the family’s close social connections were contributed by the woman’s own family network. The lack of primary source material written by women is therefore a serious limitation. I have tried to emphasise the crucial role of women in the farming household in later volumes but presenting the women’s point of view is almost impossible without diaries written by women from this class of society.

The nature of women’s work in the home and their growing dependence, as their families grew, on their daughters as assistants, contributed greatly to their lack of educational opportunity. I will say more about this in Chapter 5 and also in later volumes.

It is an irony that most family historians are women and their growing number has coincided with the rise of the internet. The latter is unparalleled in