From a memo from Richard Rowley, the CEO of DeepGen.org, who are doing an intense study of Northampton records:
Early in our data gathering for the town of Northampton, we were seeing a consistent sprinkling of “Mr” and “Mrs” in front of parent names in the baptism and burial records we were compiling. We felt that these had a significance of some kind related to social status, but we didn’t have enough information at that point to say exactly what the significance was.
Fast forward a few years and…Currently, we are adding data from the 1674 Northamptonshire Hearth Tax to our settlement of Northampton (the eleventh source layer in our integrated database) and the meaning of these titles has suddenly become clearer than ever.
It turns out there is a strong correlation between the titles of “Mr” and “Mrs” in the hearth tax records and the number of hearths owned by the people with those titles: Those with the “Mr” and “Mrs” titles have many more hearths on average. The average number of hearths for those with a title is 6.6 while the average number of hearths of those without a title is 2.2.
What wasn’t exactly clear in our early source layering became very clear in the later stages of our source layering: Titles of “Mr” and “Mrs” (as well as “Esquire” and “Sir”) have a strong correlation with the size of property owned, which of course has a correlation to wealth, which often is related to social status.
It was also a great help to verify that these titles were not affixed randomly or inconsistently to individuals: The value of the “Mr” title in separating a father recorded as “Mr. John Smith” from a father recorded simply as “John Smith” in the parish records came into focus as well.
