Staffordshire Team
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Location: Staffordshire, England
Surname/tag: Staffordshire
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Welcome to the Staffordshire Team page
Team Leader: John Elkin
Team Members: John Elkin | Stephen Heathcote | Ian Miller| David Urquhart|Elsie Hagley|Tomas Lowe|David Moss|[[Vernon-2152|Tony Vernon
Goals
The goal of the Staffordshire Team is to make all profiles the best that they can be. It is our desire to leave a lasting legacy of work for future generations and current researchers that can facilitate their quest for family history, and bring them one step closer to discovering the myriad of people it has taken for them to draw breath.
Topics
In order to achieve our goal, there are a number of things we are currently working on:
- Staffordshire Unsourced Profiles
- Staffordshire Unconnected Profiles
- Staffordshire Suggestion List
- Staffordshire Profiles managed by the England Project
Our progress can be monitored on the [County Statistics] page.
If you are interested in helping with Staffordshire, please feel free to look at the England Project page and sign up via the G2G post. If you have any questions about Staffordshire, please contact the team leader above.
Team Members Specific Interests
- John Elkin | The Elkin, Stanway, Brammar, Darling, and Hammersley families, particularly in North Staffordshire
- David Edis-Bates |
- Stephen Heathcote | Abbots Bromley and Yoxall area families
- Ian Miller|
- David Urquhart | The Pountney/Powney and Moseley/Mosley Familys of Staffordshire
- Elsie Hagley|
- Tomas Lowe|
- David Moss|
- Caroline Vernon|
- Tony Vernon | Vernon - from Staffordshire and Cheshire to Pennsylvania
Communication and Collaboration If you want to work together, go for it! You can communicate with everyone by posting to this page or by messaging individual members. Keep in mind that we will largely be working on profiles that are managed by other people—always endeavour to discuss any major changes you may wish to make to a profile with the profile manager/s involved.
Team Challenges
We have a Challenge team connected to the England Project. Members of the England Counties teams are encouraged to join The Mighty Oaks team and participate from time to time in WikiTree challenges for England.
Staffordshire Resources
Check out our Staffordshire Resources Page here.
WikiTree Help Resources
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- Private Messages: Contact the Profile Managers privately: John Elkin and England Project WikiTree. (Best when privacy is an issue.)
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- Public Q&A: These will appear above and in the Genealogist-to-Genealogist (G2G) Forum. (Best for anything directed to the wider genealogy community.)
The Sneyds were one of the leading Staffordshire gentry families, and at one stage the richest. At the moment, there are some Sneyd profiles on WikiTree but it is quite far from a full house.
I am thinking of setting up a personal project page for the Sneyd family, to pull together the various threads and to put the family members in context, in parallel to improving existing profiles and creating new profiles. This could usefully be a sub-project for Staffordshire gentry families linked to the Sneyds, including the Bagots, Chetwynds and Kynnersleys. There is also intermarriage across the Cheshire border with families such as Davenport.
I would be interested in finding out if the Staffordshire team could help me find other volunteers to join, in view of the work involved due to the size of the family and the families linked to them.
It would be also be useful to find someone locally based who was able and willing to visit the University of Keele library. The University of Keele, located in and around Keele Hall, the former seat of the senior branch of the Sneyds, purchased the family papers for its library and a number of researchers have consulted them.
Among secondary sources, there is a four volume thesis on “A Study of an ancient Staffordshire Gentry Family - the family of Ralph Sneyd, Esq., (1723-1793) of Keele, Staffordshire - with a survey of its pre-history” by Sandra Burgess, 1990. This is in the University of Keele library, but I cannot find anything more than a reference to it online.
According to the abstract it is ‘A study of an ancient Staffordshire gentry family, named Sneyd, with a focus on the 18th century and Ralph Sneyd (1723-93). Includes studies of 17th century antecedents, and their origins in medieval times. There is an analysis of everyday life in an 18th century household, including the roles of women, financial issues, and the contrast between the gentry and the 'below stairs' household’.
So this would be a useful place for work on the Sneyds in general and Ralph Sneyd in particular.
The Sneyd family is large and quite complicated. The main branch is documented in Staffordshire over at least six centuries. The family spread over time to other locations such as Cheshire, Ireland, Hampshire, and India - where Ralph Sneyd-229 commanded the Governor-General’s bodyguard. His half-sister Emma Sophia Sneyd-25 married John Russell Colvin-697, Lieutenant-Governor, North-West Provinces, and his daughter Harriett (profile to be created) married Cecil Beadon-78, Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal.
The male Sneyds usually seemed to marry heiresses to landed estates, so that even younger sons could be country gentlemen. Much of this land in Staffordshire had coal seams and iron ore in its subsoil, which was exploited especially during the Industrial Revolution, and some of the Sneyds were seriously rich.
Although I do not have Sneyd ancestors, there are several connections through marriage between my Swetenham and Archer ancestors and cousins, on one hand, and the Sneyds and Kynnersleys (also a prominent Staffordshire family in its day), on the other. The Swetenhams were based not far from Staffordshire, in Somerford Booths near Congleton in Cheshire.
The last male Kynnersley, Clement Kynnersley-5, left his estate of Loxley Park to his nephew Thomas, son of his sister Penelope Kynnersley-3 who had. married John Sneyd. Thomas changed his name to Sneyd-Kynnersley. The Sneyd-Kynnersley family kept Loxley until after the Second World War.
Another son of Penelope, Clement Sneyd-30 a naval officer, married Helen Swetenham-4, sister of Clement Swetenham (formerly Comberbach-11) of the 16th Light Dragoons, where he served in the Peninsula under his uncle Clement Archer-6507 and at Waterloo.
Clement Archer’s father William Archer-6230 had made Clement Kynnersley-5 an executor of his will. Clement Kynnersley-5 also gave Clement Swetenham the horse he was riding at Waterloo which was killed under him.
Clement’s Christian name was not just omnipresent in his lifetime: it was perpetuated by successive generations of Archers, Sneyds and Swetenhams, in certain cases up to the present day.
I am in touch with a Sneyd-Kynnersley descendant who has been actively researching his family over many years. In time for his 101st birthday next month, he has now handed over the results to his son, who by coincidence happened to be an old friend of my sister and me.
Richard Clement Swetenham
Thanks. I found this an interesting read as I am researching the Sneyd colliery disaster of 1942 and before I didn't know that the Sneyd Green area and presumably the colliery were named after the Sneyd family (ref. wiki). best regards, David
Natalie, Categorization project member
Stephen