Halhed Genealogy — Reliable
Medieval Records are Hard to Find

We are indeed fortunate to have been able to trace many of our Halhed ancestors back 500 years or more. However, all is not perfection. Descending from our first confirmed Halhed ancestor, Henry Halhed of Banbury, Oxfordshire (1517-1588) to the present day, we have been able to access various records permitting us to quite solidly document this central trunk of our family tree, to which all other branches ultimately connect.

There are a few challenges though. The great fire of Banbury in 1628 destroyed about one-third of the town, including some of the churches where many records were kept, as well as many of the Halhed family holdings — perhaps the main reason that the Halhed family started leaving the Banbury area about that time.

Before 1600 or so, much information about the various branches of our family tree is often problematic at best. The purpose of this page therefore is first, to inform the reader about our general philosophy when encountering ambiguities in the records and secondly, to hopefully help the budding genealogist avoid some of the traps littering the historical landscape, both in ancient and in more contemporary records.

One of the main problems in the early days was civil strife in the UK, most notably perhaps being Henry VIII^th's dissolution of the abbeys, which included destruction of many records and books. In addition, there were numerous wars and conflicts across the centuries, often resulting in further destruction of records.

Genealogy with a Grain of Salt:

On another web page, we gave an example of how errors of fact are propagated, literally across the centuries. In this family tree, if we know something for certain, we put in the fact, together with a reference allowing another researcher to pursue this information for their own needs. If we have minor doubts about a name or date, we will use "ca." (circa) and "?" in the records. If a will shows a spouse alive when the will was written, and we have no death date for the spouse, we will often precede the death date entry with "aft", after the date the will was written. But we will always include a citation or note as to our reasoning if not clear (at least most of the time).

Regrettably, there are many sources of "information" on the Internet showing, for example, a family tree of sorts, where all the records are based on best guesses — based on assumptions like all women married at age 21 and all men married at age 25. The same sort of inaccuracies crop into place names — a great problem exists with records including "of" references. These ofs occasionally may refer to a birthplace, but quite often they relate to other facts, such as where lands were owned or the location of a parish church supported by the individual. That's why in the notes for our tree we have "Of" events, and often the birthplace is not shown — without a Christening record, one doesn't really know for sure, as birth certificates are a relatively modern invention!

Another problematic records' category is the "wannabee" class of family trees — where people do their utmost to show that their family arrived in America on the Mayflower, that they are related to someone famous, wealthy, or whatever stripe of person they want to find. This class of family tree often is based on rather tenuous connections, with little corroboration beyond someone having had the same last name. In our records, the most common surname you will find is "Unknown" — we have used that because we just don't have any trustworthy facts.

As one travels back in time, records can become sparse. Often, two references may contradict each other in a name, date, place or other such data. When confronted with such difficulties, we again will put in notes reflecting what we found. But if you find one of our records, devoid of notes, place names or with little else than basic names, do take it with a large grain of salt — because we really don't know for certain, but may have put some people in as "placeholders" because we found some unconfirmed records, and we have a bit of the same family occurring in more recent times (and hope for a verified future connection), or some other reason that seemed good at the time.

And then there are those early family branches without real surnames, like Scottish and Welsh connections, where a person's full name might render in English as "William, son of Thomas" and the grandchild could be "George son of Andrew" — fortunately we don't have too many of these to contend with, but they do merit special care.

Miscellany:

In the many of the early visitations of the English counties during the 1500's and 1600's, an abbreviation occasionally crops up which we were unfamiliar with, and which Google didn't help resolve. I provide a solution here for others facing that same problem:
     sup'stes — followed by a date, viz. sup'stes 1567
Browsing through an old Latin dictionary, I finally found:
     superstes -stitis standing over or near; present, witnessing; surviving, living on.

In another visitation, I found it as: supstes.
 
It seems it's a Medieval ecclesiastical Latin abbreviation, used much as we use floruit (often abbreviated as fl. or flor.) nowadays — meaning literally flourishing: surviving, or known to be alive at a given date.

Last Hints:

If you do discover some family records which are part of someone else's family tree that you may need, do practice what the legal profession calls due diligence. If the other's family tree includes references, that should make things fairly easy to verify. On the other hand, if the tree seems too good to be true, and is without any citations, it's time to get out the virtual magnifying glass and do some detective work.

Do enjoy exploring our family tree — we certainly have enjoyed finding about our family connections!