Individual Notes
Note for: Byron Fox, 1884 - 10 DEC 1884
Index
Burial: Date: DEC 1884
Place: - Orion Center Cemetery, Cumminsville, (Chatfield) , Minnesota
Note:
Township Orion
County: Olmsted
Name: BYRON Fox
Birth Date: 1884
Death Date: 10/DEC/1884
Cemetery: Orion Center
Comments: SON OF SELOM & IDA Chapman Fox
Section: 5 7
Individual Notes
Note for: Nathaniel Tompkins, 24 SEP 1773 - 10 NOV 1850
Index
Census: Date: 1810
Place: Federal, Phillips, Dutchess, New York
Event: I6570
Type: REFI
Burial: Place: Duanesburg, Schenectady , New York
Note: We have located the property and the site of the old family burial ground. This graveyard was written about in the 1930s but no gravestones remain now.
Individual Note: The North - Nottinghamshire Yorkshire and Lancashire Nottinghamshire
The 1837-47 birth registrations showed a small group of Tomkins in north Nottinghamshire, and on the strength of that and a noticeably persistent number of Tomkin s-less spellings in Nottinghamshire and south Yorkshire in that and the later surveys we postulated a small concentration, possibly of a line which had clung to the sless spelling.
A little more research seems to confirm this possibility. The distribution of Tomkins entries in the 1641 Protestation Returns and the 1664-70 Hearth Tax assessments1 is shown in figure 15. Combined with the IGI Index, this reveals three distinct clumps of Tomkins in Nottinghamshire.
The largest is centred on Tuxford, in the centre of the county. All three sources place Tomkins here, with the IGI confirming not only that their presence in Tuxford itself began shortly before 1638 and continued until 1725, but that they had been in nearby villages since at least 1582.
The second group is a bit to the south, around Southwell. It seems to have begun in the 1500s and to have died out by the middle of the following century (a gentleman called Tomkins did take the Protestation Oath in nearby Newark in 1641, but may not have been a local man).
The third group is to the south in and near Nottingham itself, but consists only of one individual mentioned in the 1664 Hearth Tax and one parish register entry of 1676, so may not be very significant.
Indeed the numbers for all the groups are small - if this was a separate line then its existence must have been tenuous at times.
All of the entries in the Protestation Return and the Hearth Tax, and the great majority of those in the IGI Index, are spelled without an s, so it does seem likely the small numbers in Nottinghamshire and South Yorkshire who spell their name in that way today are their descendants (and thus more genuinely northern than their fellow Yorkshiremen called Tomkins with an s, whose ancestors probably moved up from the south last century).
But what of their ultimate origins? Did this line originate in Nottinghamshire, or did they move there from the Midlands, or from Stainburn in Yorkshire (where we found a 14th century Tomkins), some time in the late Middle Ages? At the moment I do not know.
Derbyshire
The 19th century surveys suggest that Derbyshire previously had little or no Tomkins. That appears to be the case. The IGI Index has only a little over 100 Tomkin entries, half of which are in just one parish - Clowne, in the northeast of the county, close to Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire. All but two of the pre1700 entries are in Clowne, where they start in 1674. Before that year there are no Tomkins entries in Derbyshire at all.
As mentioned, the IGI Index can be misleading, but in this case the distribution it suggests is confirmed by the 1662-1670 Hearth Tax records2 for Derbyshire, which record only one Tomkin - in Clowne.
Both the Hearth Tax and almost all the IGI entries for Clowne spell the name Tomkin, without an -s. On this basis, and because of their location, it seems very likely that the Clowne family are a branch of the Nottinghamshire line.
Lincolnshire
Again, the 19th century surveys suggest that historically Lincolnshire was not home to many Tomkins and, as can be seen from figure 15, the 1641 Protestation Returns for the county do not reveal any (though the Returns' coverage is very patchy). The IGI Index suggests that, though some were living in the city of Lincoln as early as 1572, and in nearby villages in the following century, there were never large numbers of them.
The entries in the Index are almost all spelled without an s. From this, and their geographical location, it seems likely that they are from the same line as the Nottinghamshire family, though one or two in the south of the county may have come from Leicestershire or Northants.
Figure 15: Tomkins in Hearth Tax assessments for Yorkshire, North Riding 1673 West, East Ridings, York 1672 Derbyshire 1662,-64,-70 Nottinghamshire 1664, -74 Leicestershire 1664, -66 Rutland 1665 and in Protestation Returns 1642 for Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire
Yorkshire
In the early 19th century there were very nearly no Tomkins in Yorkshire, yet the 1379 Poll Tax returns for the West Riding revealed a Robert Thomkyn at Stainburn. I speculated that he might have been an early ancestor of an s-less Tomkin line which may possibly exist in Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire at the present time.
As we have just seen, there does seem to have been such a Tomkin line in Nottinghamshire. If Robert was their ancestor, then not only must the first of that line have moved south at quite an early date (since they were in Nottinghamshire as early as 1573) but in fact the whole Stainburn line must have moved, since I can find no trace of Tomkins in the area.
The birth registration survey showed almost no Tomkins of any spelling in Yorkshire in the 1830s and 1840s. A look at the IGI Index suggests that Yorkshire was largely clear of Tomkins before then, since the Index contains only 88 Tomkins entries altogether, the great majority of which are from the 19th century. In fact there are only three entries before 1700, all of them marriages, and all up in the North Riding.
I have also looked at a variety of Muster Rolls and Lay Subsidy Rolls covering various parts of the West Riding3 in the 16th and early 17th centuries4 (and a few from earlier periods) but have not found a single reference to a Tomkins. However the coverage is very patchy, and it is not until the 1672/3 Hearth Tax records that one gets complete coverage of the whole of Yorkshire. The Hearth Tax assessments very nearly confirm the complete absence of Tomkins from Yorkshire.
I say nearly, because to my surprise they list a Nicholas Tomkin in Midleham in the North Riding, south of Richmond.5 This is intriguing - Midleham is not far from two of the pre1700 IGI entries which I mentioned above6 (and not too distant from Stainburn, either). The combination of the Hearth Tax entry and the two IGI ones7 looks like something which just might be some descendants of Robert Thomkyn - or could just be a Nottinghamshire branch which moved north. This needs further investigation.
So we are left uncertain as to what happened to Robert Thomkyn. Were it not for the Midleham man I would say it seems most likely that, like Nicholas Thomekin in Suffolk, Robert or his descendants either moved away (possibly to Nottinghamshire) at a very early date, or did not leave any descendants called Tomkin. However it is possible that these shadowy figures up in the North Riding are descended from him. Of course, the Nottinghamshire and North Riding groups could both be his descendants.
Lancashire
At present Lancashire has substantial numbers of Tomkins, and even in 1837 - 47 there were quite a few, mostly in Liverpool. However even in the last 150 years the numbers shrink noticeably as one goes back in time, and I inferred that they had probably moved to Lancashire from the south not long before the 1830s.
The IGI Index for Lancashire seems to confirm this. Despite being one of the larger Indexes, it has only a few Tomkins entries, and only one from before 1700. It seems clear that the 19th century Tomkins in Lancashire did not originate there.
Cheshire
The same can be said of Cheshire. The 19th century surveys reveal very few Tomkins in the county, and so does the IGI Index. It has only 23 Tomkins entries, of which only two date from before 1700 (both in the 1670s, one in Chester, the county town, and the other in Audlem, right on the southern border with Shropshire).
Clearly the Tomkins who migrated to the industrial cities in Lancashire came from further south still.
Westmorland, Cumberland, Durham and Northumberland
The modern surveys and the IGI Indexes for these counties all combine to confirm that no Tomkins line originated in the far north of England. The Indexes for Westmorland, Cumberland and Durham have a total of 8 Tomkins entries between them, while Northumberland does not have many more.
The Northumberland Index does have some remarkably early entries, however, which show that between 1583 and 1605 two families of Tomkins were living in Berwick on Tweed, the fortress town in the northernmost corner of England. At that time England and Scotland were two separate kingdoms divided by a bloody and lawless border, and Berwick was a garrison city. It is quite likely these two Tomkins were soldiers, or connected in some way to the garrison, rather than local men.
However, whether they came from the south or not, they do seem to have stayed in the area, since the Index has a scattering of entries in Newcastle in the mid 17th century, and a few more in both Newcastle and Berwick the following century and in Berwick into the 19th (figure 3 shows 6 Tomkins births which were registered in Berwick in 1837-47).
There are no Tomkins entries in the modern telephone directory for Berwick, however.