The ‘All About That Place’ event, as well as a short course I was doing at the same time: Progressing Your Local History Research (346) through Pharos Tutors, inspired me to start a couple of ‘One Place Studies’, and to register them with the Society for One Place Studies.

One of my studies, Starbotton in Wharfedale, focuses on the Early Modern period – roughly 1500-1750, although depending on the records available, it may end up homing in on just part of that period. Starbotton is part of the parish of Kettlewell and importantly, no parish registers for the period before 1698/ 1700 have survived. Although there are some Bishop’s Transcripts for the seventeenth century, survival of these records too is limited and patchy. This means I have no continuous register of any kind to use as a foundation for rebuilding the community of people in Starbotton before the last fifty years of my period of interest. The primary challenge will be to locate as many alternative sources as possible and then find ways to make them work together.

Prior to the Local History course my research in Starbotton had focused on my Simondson family. I already had Wills for three of the Simondson men who died between 1693/4 and 1712/13, plus the Probate register entry only for another, John, who died in 1705 and named Anthony as his executor. Christopher’s was a holographic Will, meaning a group of trusted family and friends gathered at his deathbed, helped him to organise his thoughts, and wrote up the document after his death, all of them signing to verify that the contents were the wishes of the deceased. The Wills of Lister and Christopher are accompanied by Inventories, which are also signed by everyone involved in that process.

Something I had previously noticed – both here and in another small village where I’ve accessed quite a few Wills – was the sense of community evoked through all the people involved in the Probate process – witnesses, executors, the men doing the inventory, bondsmen and so on – and that’s in addition to the named beneficiaries. They all pulled together to help each other at this time of need, and to ensure the wives and children were properly cared for.

With this in mind I decided to ‘map’ the network created by the three Simondson Wills, plus John’s Probate Register entry. Every fact, and every single person shown on the network chart at the top of this post came from a close reading of these Probate documents. I do have some additional information about some of the people, gained from other records. For example, it is Thomas Simondson who is my direct ancestor, and I have more information about him and his family, but his Will does not seem to have survived. I was surprised to find that, excluding beneficiaries, there were twenty people involved in this network-mapping process: nineteen men and one woman. Adding in the named beneficiaries brings the total to thirty-seven: eleven women/ girls and six men/ boys are named beneficiaries. This younger generation will make my job a bit easier since most of them undergo some religious rite or other that brings them into the period of the surviving parish registers.

Homing in on householders though – which in itself would be a great step forward – these Wills have given me a LOT of information about the village community. I do recognise most of the surnames and in some cases the first names too. Comparison with a transcript of the 1672 Lady Day Hearth Tax return, and also with a list of churchwardens from all available Bishop’s Transcripts indicates that most are from the parish. However, the parish includes Kettlewell as well as Starbotton, so there is still work to do in trying to separate out the two.

A person’s ‘community’ is not necessarily restricted to his or her village. In addition to the village community there will be wider networks too, based on friendships, marriages, worship (e.g. Nonconformists in rural locations would have a geographically wider network), business, market days, and so on. Based just on my Simondson family, I know that they had family connections throughout Wharfedale and into what is now Lancashire too. This also seems to me to be part of the history of a Place: where were the wider networks and connections? What were the reasons for this? And was it different for people from different social levels?

I’ve now located about ten more Wills for the same period for other testators living in Starbotton and will gradually collect and transcribe these, looking for overlaps, and comparing the findings to other records known to be for residents of Starbotton.