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What delighted us all was the discovery that Stokesley and Great Ayton are still delightful towns with sufficient landmarks to enable us to appreciate how things looked in the 1770s and 80s. Although both are probably a lot smarter and cleaner now, they have been spared significant Victorian and 20th century development, which might have changed them entirely. The eastern approach to the town from College Square is dominated by the mid-Victorian Town Hall set on the western side of a spacious piazza known as The Plain and extending to the 18th century Manor House on the east side. Flanked by three or four storey Georgian shops and inns, Stokesley offers a welcoming aspect.

Behind the rectangular Town Hall block is a smaller, cobbled space, which was the ancient Market Place. A pattern in the ground and a blue plaque on a nearby wall, reminds us that here stood the old market cross. It was badly damaged in an anti-papist riot around 1747 but not finally destroyed until it became the centre of a huge bonfire set up to celebrate Admiral Rodney’s 1779 naval victory at Gibraltar.

Facing the Market Place and with its back to the spot where the Town Hall now stands was the former Toll Booth and Butter Market. A sketch made from an old painting shows arched doorways to the Butter Market on the ground floor and a ladder to the upstairs Toll Booth, where every person leaving Stokesley carrying a basket or parcel had to pay a toll of one penny. Also kept here was the steelyard, a steel rod one yard in length used to standardise the traders’ measuring sticks and other weights and measures.

In his memoirs, Joseph Potter records that his parents kept a common bakehouse, where the family lived, “our house stood fully a quarter of a mile from the entrance of the town, and it stood alone, separate from any other house, only adjoined the Toll Booth in the market place nearly in the centre of the town.” The old painting shows a shop (in the nineteenth century a hatters) built onto the south end of the Toll Booth, whilst behind this – on the south-east side there is another small shop still extant. The whole block has undergone many structural changes and it is not known what stood to the back (east side) of the Toll Booth, where the Town Hall now stands, but it seems highly probable that one of these was the Potter family’s common bakehouse.

It was here that Joseph was born in 1769 and passed his first decade until his mother died and he went to live with his aunt at Great Ayton. He would have grown up in the heart of this flourishing market town, where he would have witnessed all the comings and goings as well as the sufferings of the petty malefactors who would have been placed in the stocks or whipping post, which also stood in front of the Toll Booth; although the damaged Market Cross still had a few more months left after Joseph moved from Stokesley.

News posted today by Seraphim Newman-Norton that the tour around Yorkshire will begin next Tuesday

Next week, John Townsend (Hereford), Marion Sumpter (Falmouth) and I will be visiting sites in North Yorkshire associated with Joseph Potter. We will be staying just outside Middlesborough but plan to visit Stokesley in Cleveland, where Joseph was born in 1769; Great Ayton, where he lived with his aunt and uncle and attended school; and Whitby, where he first went to sea in 1788. Armed with his own account of these early years, we hope to understand how the local landscape influenced this ancestor’s choices. Although much will have changed in the intervening 240 years, we hope there will be sufficient “footprints” to guide us time travellers. Watch this space, as we shall report back on our potterings in the North !

Keep an eye out for new photos and information when available on our forums, fingers crossed for new discoveries and an insight on Joseph Potters birth place.

This will be a significant step in almost half a century of gathering material relating to this family. Now seems to be an appropriate occasion to pay tribute to two of my kinsmen, whom sadly I never met, but whose work – quite independent of my own – will have been brought to completion. Bertha Voysey (1915-1996) and Leonard Townsend (1915-2001) were first cousins, whose mothers were two daughters of Thomas George Newman (1840-1933). Following their respective retirements, they embarked on their genealogical adventure, Bertha having the advantage of living close to the National Archives at Kew but Leonard making good use of early computerisation to collate data. Through their efforts much material has been preserved which otherwise would almost certainly have been lost.

The website will continue to be updated and, through its Forum, we intend to continue the task of unravelling and recording one family’s past.
Full can be found at http://newmanfamilyhistory.com
Visit our community forums at http://newmanfamilyhistory.com/forums

The street is now quite mixed with some late Victorian houses. There is also one terrace of brick houses on the west side called “Hayles Terrace” and dated 1853. Further down on the same side are some very plain brick houses which could date from around 1816 or any time up to the 1850s. In my opinion this could be the original Gibraltar Row as it is a single row of modest dwellings and therefore the earliest houses in the street. They could date from a few decades later but it would be unlikely that the earlier houses should be pulled down in the 1840s or 1850s only to be replaced by something almost identical. At the north end of this row is a recess called Fives Court (visible by the lamp post and blue sign on the wall in both photos), which leads into a serpentine passageway (with some old brick walls) which leads directly in East Place, West Square where we know that Hugh Newman’s nephew, Samuel Hugh Newman was living 1838-184. Knowing that the Newmans usually lived in very close proximity to one another, I think this is another confirmation that these houses constitute at least part of the original Gibraltar Row.

The fact that the Leedle household was at 24, Gibraltar Row suggests there were more houses than at present but I would venture the opinion that the ones in my photograph are from the original row, so that we can know what sort of house No. 24 would have been, even if we can no longer identify it (the numbers having been changed to accommodate the new houses).

Sometime it might be worth checking the 1841 & 1851 Census to see if one can ascertain anything about the increase in the number of houses in this decade.

Original Discussion: Join the forums

As the founder of this website and author of the first published history of our family, “A Victorian Family: The origins and subsequent history of the family of Hugh John Newman” in 2006, I should explain why we have thought it desirable to erect this site and the purposes to which I hope it will be put.

My interest in family history began when I was a schoolboy, probably around 1961. Fortunately at that time my grandparents were still alive and several great uncles and aunts who remembered their grandparents and had anecdotes and verbal family tradition stretching back to the Regency period. As they died off and their effects were scattered, I began collecting family memorabilia: photographs, letters, pages from the family Bible and memorial cards, which otherwise would have been lost or made little sense to later generations.

Periodically, when I had spare time, I indulged my genealogical interests and tracked down further information from parish registers or in various public archives. It was this information which I used to compile my “Victorian Family.”
In a few short years, however, the widespread use of the internet has transformed the picture and made available resources previously scattered over many places, complete with search-engine facilities which can now retrieve data in minutes rather than requiring fruitless hours of trawling through records. The advent of the 1901 census online and the huge teething problems experienced with accessing it, was followed in rapid succession by making accessible online all the census returns from 1841. The publications of the 1911 census before the expiration of a full century is another wonderful boon to family history researchers.

In 2008 I realised that my history was already being superseded by new discoveries and a random message left on Ancestry.co.uk brought a rapid response from the first of many kinsmen who shared my enthusiasm for our family history, which has since continued to grow as others joined us. With their support and generosity in sharing their skills and their own precious resources, combined with a passion for research, we have made a formidable team and new discoveries have come thick and fast. The key to this success is simply collaboration and it is in this spirit that this website is launched.

The projected new family history, which we are hoping to have ready for the printer by May, is far more than a new edition. Although it contains the core of the earlier history, at approximately 55,000 words it is five times larger and includes the earlier history, chronicling events before the Newmans moved to London in about 1784. Apart from sharing our common heritage it is hoped that the launch of the book and its associated website will widen the net to link even more descendants of our particular family of Newmans. Hopefully, through these contacts and further internet resources (especially the London Metropolitan Archives) coming online, there will be a need for a subsequent edition before too long !

Thank you for visiting and I hope to see you in the forums soon.

Full site coming soon at http://newmanfamilyhistory.com/
Visit our community at http://newmanfamilyhistory.com/forums/
From Sylvan Surrey to Babylon – The Newman Family of Dorking, Epsom and London: Book due out at the end of May 2009