Can we join the Lambourn-Sparsholt Tree to any other? |
If you check out the origins of the Lambourn-Sparsholt Tree as we presently have them documented you will no doubt identify the gaps in our knowledge.
We have speculated in the past about the John Lovelock that we identify as the progenitor, in terms of whether he had two wives - Jane and Mary - or whether the husband of Mary was in fact John the son of John and Jane whose baptism is either undocumented or unidentified.
That leads us on to the fact that there is only one burial of a John at Lambourn - in 1724.
Another consideration is that in the late 17th Century, and later of course, it was very common for the first two children in a family to be named after their mother and father, if they were of the appropriate sex, naturally! Such speculation supports the idea that John and Jane had a son John as their first child, although that would mean that we have the death of either the father or son unidentified.
The first child of John and Jane that we do definitely know about is Richard, baptised at Lambourn in 1672. That caught our particular interest at one time, as the current progenitor of the Lieflock Line is also of course a Richard, who married at Preshute in 1706, that being the earliest certain mention of him. However, we have speculated again about his origins, and in doing so homed in on a Richard who was baptised in Tidcombe in 1680, the son of Thomas and Jone (sic).
The first-born of Thomas and Jone, as far as the surviving documentation is concerned, was Elizabeth in 1669, so if her parents married about 1668, that suggests that Thomas might have been born about 1645.
Now, Tidcombe and Lambourn are some 15 plus miles apart, so in terms of the generally-accepted lack of mobility back then there seems no reason to connect them. But 1645 was in the middle of the Civil War, and there could have been considerable upheaval for some years afterwards. Thus, if Thomas (c. 1645) had a brother John, he, John, might have moved once or twice to find employment, especially if he was single.
So in this theoretical scenario if John was born around 1647 he could have made it to Lambourn in time to marry Jone and father, perhaps, John in 1669 and Richard in 1672. And if that was true, he might be the uncle of the Richard who started the Lieflock Line.
But all that is supposition of course, and will so remain as far as we can tell at present.