Hingston Newsletter No 1

Issued 28th August 2007

This newsletter has been sent by email to everyone who I know of who has contacted me about the Hingston One-Name study, and has also been posted on the web.

If you found this newsletter on the web and didn't receive a copy by email (by the end of August 2007) it means I don't have your email address. Please contact me so that I can add your email address for future mailings. I promise not to send you emails more than twice a year and I will not pass your email address to other people unless I am certain that you are closely related.

If you were sent a copy of this newsletter by email and do not wish to hear from me again, please contact me asking to remove your name from my address list.

Introduction

This is the first of an occasional series of Newsletters that I will issue when there have been major changes to the Hingston study pages. I have spent some time over the summer updating many pages on the web site, and I hope they are now easier to use.

Please check your own link

Please check that the reference to your own connection to the web pages is correct. Many people have changed their email address since the pages were first written and the links no longer work.

I get many requests for copies of email addresses, but I rarely give them out since I wish to respect people's privacy. However, this means that in many cases cousins cannot get in touch. The best way to make sure that people know how to contact you is for me to add an entry, in the appropriate place in the tree, which says something like: "John Hingston was the grandfather of Jane Smith who can be contacted at jane.smith@somewhere.com". That does mean your email is visible but also means that cousins can contact you.

Search facility

I have reintroduced a search facility to the web pages. Google provides a facility to search a particular web site. It uses the copy of the site that they keep, which may be a few weeks out of date, so may not reflect the most recent changes, but should still prove useful as the information does not change that frequently. Google do not put any advertisements on the page yet but they reserve the right to do so in the future.

Maps

Google have introduced a facility called Google Maps. I have made use of this to produce a web page which shows where Hingston families are to be found around the world. You can view maps or satellite images, at a variety of scales. There are markers on the page which show you the connection from any particular place, and provide links to the most relevant place. You can zoom in or out at will and move around. The starting point for the map is centred on Hingston Farm, near Bigbury, which I suspect is the source of the family name.

For the maps to work you must have a fairly modern web browser and you must have Javascript enabled on your computer. If you see no map when you go to the maps page you will need to update your installation.

At the moment the links are from the map to the web pages, but I hope at some time in the future to add a facility to go the other way, from the web pages to the map.

If you want me to add another marker I need to know the exact latitude and longitude of the place (to six decimal places), together with a short description to appear in the link and a note of where I should link to. Clicking on the map away from a marker will give the position where you have clicked. Please make sure that the link is to the correct place at the maximum resolution.

FreeBMD

The project, run by FreeBMD, to provide a searchable index of Birth, Marriage and Death records for England and Wales from 1837-1900 is now virtually complete. I have abstracted all the Hingston data but unfortunately I am not allowed to publish it here because of copyright. Most of the Hingston lines will use this data at some point. For the first time, it is now possible to check precisely how many entries there are. It seems that only about half of the Hingston entries in FreeBMD have counterparts in the Hingston web pages, so we still have some way to go! I have updated many entries to reflect the information that is now becoming available.

Contacting me

I can be contacted by email at Chris Burgoyne <cjb@eng.cam.ac.uk>. Please put [HING] before the subject so that I can correctly identify these emails and separate them from my normal emails. I have, at some time, typed most of the material on this site but I don't recall all the details; please help me by giving me details about which family you are referring to, and which individual, on which page. I will try to get back to you as soon as possible but the day job has to take priority.

Corrections

If there are errors in the web pages please let me know. There are probably spelling mistakes and possibly some broken links, or links that work in some browsers but not in others. If you find these I would like to correct them, so please let me know where they are.

Early Hingston Entries

The objective of our study is to try to link together as many of the Hingston families as possible, but I am now fairly certain that we will not get them all. The Devon Lay Subsidy Rolls for 1542 have now been copied, and there were 17 parishes which had Hingston entries. Since these predate parish registers by at least 60 years, and are about 200 years after the introduction of surnames, the only way of linking these families together would be from official records lilke Wills. Sadly, many of the early entries from Devon were destroyed in World War II. However, we should be able to push most of the lines back to about 1600, which would be quite an achievement if we could do it.

Missing information

There are several places where we know that information should be available. If anyone is looking for a small project can I suggest the following:-

There were Hingstons in Ipswich in Suffolk about which we know very little
There were many Hingstons in the area North and East of Totnes in Devon
There were many Hingstons around South Huish in Devon which have not been studied
There are many Hingstons who were in the coastguard service
Can anyone extract entries from the censuses? I may not be able to place them here as a list for copyright reasons but I could add individual entries where appropriate.
There are many entries on the Odds and Ends page that could be followed up. Do any relate to your family. If so, let me know.
There is the certainty that a George Hingston was involved in the slave trade, and Hingstons who lived on a plantation in Barbados. Are they his descendants or are they descended from slaves who took his name?
There are many inconsistencies in the Irish Hingston tree, HN, partly due to the loss of official records in Ireland. The possible links from the Holbeton Hingstons to John the organist and then on to the Irish tree are very tenuous.

Thank you

Finally, some words of thanks. Most of the Hingston trees have not been researched by me; all I have done is to assemble them. They are the result of lots of small pieces of information which have been found by different people. That information then gets added into these pages, and often turns out to be the useful key that opens a door for other people. I try to spot the links between different trees, but I often miss things. Thank you to everyone who has helped put these pages together, and thank you in advance for the contributions you will make in the future.

Chris Burgoyne, Cambridge, 28th August 2007