Consider the Evidence ... and Speculate


There are a number of possibilities relating to the progenitors of the fragment entitled 'The Brimpton Branch', Thomas Lovelock and his wife Sarah (surname presently unknown), none of which may apparently be excluded by the existing evidence variously drawn from our data collections elsewhere on this Web Site.

The possibilities are :

        1. That Thomas was the man baptised at Hungerford in 1774, which would be consistent with his age of 64 at burial.

        2. That Sarah was the Sarah Lane born at Thatcham in 1785, and that she married Thomas at Kingsclere in 1805.

        3. That said Thomas had previously married Martha Dopson at Hungerford in 1802, despite there being no apparent burial of Martha in our records.

        4. That the man who married Martha Dopson was the Thomas baptised at Ramsbury in 1781.

        5. That the Thomas baptised at Ramsbury in 1781 married Sarah Lane at Kingsclere in 1805, although this would not be consistent with his age at burial.

        6. That Thomas and Sarah, the progenitors of this fragment, are an as-yet-otherwise-undiscovered couple.


[John Lewis believed 1. and 2. above to be the case, and incorporated the relevant information into his Kingsclere families database, which used to be accessible online, but has now been removed.]

But what scope is there for further speculation that is not based on existing Parish Register entries? Let us consider the geography of the district for a start. Brimpton is barely 6 miles from Aldermaston so should we look for a possible connection there? Curiously, although the Lovelock baptism entries in the Aldermaston Registers extracted for our collection start in 1665 and run to 1762 there is then a gap of 58 years until another Lovelock was presented for baptism. Is that not strange?

There are Lovelock marriages in Aldermaston after 1762 but only two of males - John in 1781 and Elisha in 1787 - that could have produced further Aldermaston Lovelock baptism candidates, but neither apparently did according to the data we have collected. In any case neither could be the father of a Thomas born in 1775.

So we turn to possible Aldermaston candidates for that Thomas's father. There are three, although one is marginal, and they are the sons William, Nathaniel and Edward of John Lovelock and Catherine Girdler. Edward was baptised at Aldermaston on 11 January 1756, probably born towards the end of 1755, so would have been no more than 20 years old when Thomas was born. That would have been an early age to marry considering the custom of the times, and we do know that he married Elizabeth Webb in Brimpton in 1785 so would have to have been widowed before then, a situation we have no evidence of. However, this does provide a clear Lovelock link between Brimpton and Aldermaston.

Next, Nathaniel was baptised at Aldermaston on 25 February 1753, but that is all we know of him. He could have married in time to be the father of Thomas but there is no evidence in our records to support that.

Finally William. He was baptised at Aldermaston on 31 January 1747 so would have been 28 when Thomas was born. However, we have no evidence of William marrying, nor indeed of any other event in his life.

So is the Brimpton Branch linked to the Aldermaston Tree or the Kingsclere Line? Who can say!