They didn't move in those days
 

A line of my family came from Petersfield, Hampshire. If you look on a map, it is right on the border with Sussex, and very close to Surrey.

When I researched the Poling (there is a village called Poling in Sussex!) family, it involved trips to the Hampshire Record Office. The wills were open access, but you had to load the microfilm and scroll through to find each one. So I just looked at Hampshire.

I can't find any Poling marriages pre the 1760s, and even in later unions, the women seemed to spring from nowhere.

Now, two wills from Sussex have mentioned the wives of my ancestor Thomas Poling and looped my line back into Surrey.

There aren't wire fences round county boundaries, and it's noticeable that people might be living in one county, but taking their babies to be baptised in another.

Ancestry has opened up avenues of research that were (to say the least) challenging in the past.

Is this helping you? Have your ancestors moved a couple of miles, but into a completely different jurisdiction?

My Stilwell and Harding families lived on the boundary of Sussex, Surrey and Hampshire.

Many of them were baptised and buried at Linchmere, which is in Sussex, but others are found in Frensham or Haslemere (Surrey) or over the border into Hampshire.

I have a very useful map showing the parishes adjacent to the county boundaries. I helped my to understand the geography better when I first started researching them.

We also have a similar situation now we have moved here - just 4 miles down the road Berkshire collides with Surrey and Hampshire. The attachment shows this well:
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/...ade?view=plain

Not quite the same thing, but I researched in vain for an embarrassing number of years, looking for a mention of the Holden family in the Domesday book, tipped off by a respected Lancashire historian. Finally the penny dropped. Lancashire did not exist then! Once that had dawned, I found them easily, with intriguing phonetic versions of their names. I knew I had the right family because they still had the same property for centuries.

I do have families which turn up suddenly in the records having apparently just dropped down from space. I've spent many fruitless hours trying to connect them to likely nearby parishes with no luck so far.

OC

We may be distant cousins, Elizabeth! I am descended from the Richard Harding who married Hannah Horseley in Frensham, and subsequently lived in Linchmere.

This is my 4x-great-grandfather, James Harding.

https://www.genealogistsforum.co.uk/...=James+Harding

Do you have the two volumes of "Shottermill, its farms, families and mills"? Part 2 covers 1730 to the early 20th century. My Hardings are mentioned in some detail, but there are a couple of errors. There were at least two branches - the carpenters and the papermakers.

My grandparents' house in Guildford was named Linchmere and their ashes are scattered in the graveyard, close to William and Elizabeth Stilwell, whose graves still stand.

It is taking me a bit of time to get my head round this. Nothing for forty years, and suddenly two generations in a day!

There are lots of Abraham cousins to sort out. My Hardings may be the papermaker side. William Toop and Abraham Gregory were half brothers, sons of Olive Harding, and in 1861 were paper makers, both in Dover.

Isn't it great?

I recently had a minor breakthrough via DNA matches which encouraged me to look at a couple of lines I hadn't touched for years. The records are now on FMP and - bang! - back 4 generations.

One of my English lot seemed to stay in Essex as far as I can sort. Another I can’t find a lot on but mostly Sussex and another I can find nothing but they say they came from Somerset. The others were Cabrach in Scotland and Kerry in Ireland and Germany.

Hubby’s Ariel family went from on end of England to the other looking for wives. I have the Sawrey and Kirkbys from the Lake District ( then Lancs) and the Naylors from Yorkshire. They then ended up with the Ariel lot from Bristol.

My Huband lot were originally from Warwickshire. Seemed to be there for generations, then my ancestor went to the Royal Marines and ended up in East Stonehouse, married a woman from many generations of Devon people, and her son married a girl from Cornwall.

Once in Australia they mixed in with each other. First fleet convicts and wealthy land owners all muddled in together.

The muddling happened here as well. Most of my great grandparents would never have met in the UK, except the Irish Catholic lot, but they settled in the same district and married someone from the same village in Ireland, Probably knew each other from back home.
The next generation had the mixing of Irish Catholic and Irish Protestant which did not go down so well with both sets of parents.

Most of my ancestors lived in the same villages, until they left to come to the colonies (mostly NSW). I can trace them back to the beginning of the parish registers in most families. There are couple of exceptions -

The birthplace of my great grandfather Reuben Page has been variously described as Sandhurst, York Town and Blackwater. It was very confusing at first, till I discovered that that they are virtually the same place, crossing over the borders of 3 counties.

The other confusing family was the Collis family - in 1841 they lived in Hurst St Nicholas, Wiltshire. Soon after, this isolated part of Wiltshire was transferred to Berkshire. I wondered why Thomas who died in 1796 was buried in Sparsholt Hampshire - a search of the parish registers show he was born there, but owned property in nearby Winchester, Sherfield upon Loddon and Hurst, which he left to his various sons.
But the Sparsholt registers enabled me to take the family back several generations and I was able to fill out several branches.