Re: Norman Brigham, Portsmouth, England
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Re: Norman Brigham, Portsmouth, England
Peter Brigham 11/11/01
I don't know of anyone claiming to be related to Thomas Brigham ancestor of most of the USA families, tho' I'd be interested to hear from anyone who did. You may not be aware that there are several entirely separate Brigham strands to complicate matters. Basically, there's a group originating from Bridgeham in Norfolk, who spread in the medieval period to Cambridge (where several were mayors and gernally important people) and Oxfordshire, where they held a fair bit of land up to the 16th century. The early 19th-century American Brigham family geneologists thought they were related to the Oxfrod bunch and wrongly used their coat-of-arms for the family association. Several were buried back in Norwich Cathedral when they died. Others spread from these areas to London, where one was coachmaker to Charles I; the king still owed him money when he was beheaded. A Cumbrian group probably originate from the hamlet of Brigham near the west coast. One was gunner of Carlisle Castle. Others were merchants in Northumberland, several becoming mayors of Newcastle circa 1500. Families now living in the Holy Island area are related to later Yorkshire migrants, I believe. The main cluster are like myself and the USA branches, from East Yorkshire, named after the township of Brigham, in Foston parish. The earliest 'de Brighams' were lords of the manor from at least the late 1100s until the 1790s, when they moved to Lymm in Cheshire, and died out around the 1840s. They were Catholics until the end, on the Royalist side in the Civil War. The rest of the East Riding families have mainly been farmers, Thomas Brigham being from a reasonably well-off family of husbandmen from Holme-upon-Spalding Moor, where the LDS place them in the late 1400s. My own family were also husbandmen, later yeomen farmers, in the neighbouring village of Hayton, at least as early as the 1530s, so we may be related, but this cannot be proved. Early church and manorial court records, tax lists etc may still have some information from this early period.
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Re: Norman Brigham, Portsmouth, England
Peter Brigham 11/01/02