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Medway at Dawn by Bob Turner via Flickr (CC BY SA, 2.0 License)

Our Kentish Genealogy is a personal compilation, tracing a branch of my ancestral families roots back through the centuries. Click on the menu bar at the top left hand corner to access posts on specific families, individual and haplogroups. As time permits I will add more families and information about the parishes where they lived.

Some entries go back to Medieval era when, in theory at least, all land was owned by the king. The great families were given holdings, which passed from one generation to the next, but could be given or taken away by royal decrees. This society is sometimes described in terms of three divisions: knights (who fought the nations battles), clergy (who served the church) and peasants (whose labours supported the other two classes).

While a number of my families claim descent from the knights, our roots primarily harken back to the working class.

Most of "the stuff" in our genealogies comes from a later era, when society was divided into another three classes:

• Landowners - who were usually the leading families of their parishes. A very limited number were given the right to vote for the "knights of the shire" who represented Kent in parliament. For example, Stockbury had hundreds of residents but only 7 electors during 1754. One of them was my ancestor William Clinch, who actually lived in the neighbouring parish of Bredgar. After William's death, his son Thomas Clinch took his place in the lists. This system appears to have disappeared after the electoral reform of 1884.
• Tenants - who often rented farmland in our rural parishes. Some of them were able to purchase their own land.
• Labourers - some of whom aspired to become tenants.

We largely come from rural parishes around Maidstone, in the north of Kent, but there a Hampshire family and a few from Medieval Norfolk.