DESCENDENTS OF JAMES BARTON CLAY 1787 - 1875

My great great grandfather James Barton CLAY lived in Wirksworth and later in Belper. He had three marriages and nine children, but only four appear to have had descendents of their own. The CLAY surname has become extinct in the line leading to my mother, so I have been tracing all JBC's descendants partly in the hope of finding a living related CLAY.

In February 2003 I concluded this research (although there are still some incomplete lines) and published a 60 page account of my findings, copies of which have been passed on to a dozen relatives. This book can now be read online here. (NB. Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader to open the file, and may be slow to open on a dial up connection).

(A copy of this tree can also be found on Rootsweb's WorldConnect Project - database "alanbloor1")

THE HART FAMILY OF STANLEY, DERBYSHIRE

I have been going through the parish registers of Stanley extracting all the references to the name "HART." Recently I have had to expand this to include "HARTSHORN" since it appears that from around 1800 to 1850 various members of the family couldn't decide which surname to use!! I hope to build up a large family tree out of all this.

The earliest reference to the name "HART" in Stanley is a baptism in 1726 to "Omefrey" (Humphrey) HART and his wife Dorothy. The earlier registers have no HARTs or HARTSHORNs. Around 1800 the name HARTSHORN appears for the first time, and there are no HARTs listed again until 1850. After that the number of HARTSHORNs decreases and there are HARTs around again. That the names were used interchangeably can be proved by comparing the baptismal registers with the census returns, and consecutive censuses with each other. The same families use different surnames at different times.

One other complication of this study is that the burial registers for Stanley from 1813 to 1901 were destroyed in a fire at the church before they were filmed. So for this period I only have Bishops Transcripts (which stop at 1847) and Memorial Inscriptions to go on.

At the present time I have a tree which stretches from a marriage sometime before 1726 to a death in 1995, covering seven generations, all in Stanley. This tree has now grown into a tree of related individuals in Stanley, and can be found on the Rootsweb WorldConnect site - database "alanbloor2."

STANGER OF RUTLAND

I have been compiling this tree in conjunction with several other people. The family starts with Humphrey and Dorothy Stanger in Barrowden at the turn of the 18th century, and covers several generations in a number of Rutland and Leicestershire villages.

Part of this tree can be found on this website, but a full version is available on Rootsweb WorldConnect - database "alanbloor3."

THE STANLEY "ONE PLACE" STUDY

This is my main topic of research at the moment, and the information obtained can be found as a separate section of this website.