For those of you working on the Huguenot Migration Project, here's a clue I turned up back in 2005, while visiting England:
My mother and I were visiting Baptist heritage sites, and while we were at Loughwood, she spotted the surname "French" on some of the gravestones in the churchyard. Since her grandmother's maiden name was French, and she was born in Frome, Somerset (which isn't all that far away -- at least to a Canadian), she wondered if those Frenches might be related to her Frenches. So, we drove into Kilmington, where the Baptists built a new church after the persecution of Baptists ended, and looked for the Baptist church. Some very nice ladies listened to our story and said, "Oh, you should talk to Cyril! His mother was a French!" So, we got a guide to lead us to Cyril's house, and we had a nice chat with Cyril.
It turns out that Cyril's Frenches were originally Huguenot refugees. The locals couldn't pronounce their French surname, so they just called them "Les Frenches", and apparently the name stuck enough that it became their English surname. He had this astonishingly detailed family tree that he had hand-drawn, going back to the original refugees, and I took a bunch of photos with a digital camera, and transferred it into my mother's computer, but unfortunately, the computer got stolen, so we've lost all that data. (And I never did find out if Cyril's "Frenches" were our "Frenches". Grrr.)
But still, at least some "Frenches" living in the area are descended from Huguenots. Of course, it seems likely to me that other, non-Huguenot families who emigrated to England for other reasons may well have gotten called "Les Frenches", too, which would complicate the picture somewhat. But even so, a clue is a clue.
Greg
