I am hoping that you may know of someone with knowledge of the history of North Cockerington who may be able to help me.
I am a descendant of John Martin, who was parish clerk at Ufford, Northants, in the early C18th, and of his son, of the same name. I have always been intrigued by the fact that the son married Winnifred Spendley from North Cockerington, over 50 miles away in Lincolnshire. This marriage was at Ufford in 1717. The bride’s name is so distinctive that I overcame my initial scepticism about her place of birth, especially as her date of birth fits and the fact that there is no Spendley family anywhere in the Ufford area.
Until recently I was sure that John senior had been baptised at Ufford in 1660, but then the North Cockerington parish register became available online in browsable form, so naturally I combed through it looking for any detail I had missed on the Spendleys. Instead what I discovered was that it was the Martin family that had been the migrants. John senior’s parents, yet another John Martin and his wife Hanna, suddenly turn up in North Cockerington, when their infant son John (the one baptised at Ufford) is buried there in 1663. They then have another son John baptised there in 1665, so this is my ancestor, the future Ufford parish clerk, not the one baptised in Ufford as I had previously thought. John and Hanna had no more children baptised at North Cockerington, but both were buried there in 1680, which neatly explains why I could not trace their burials in the Ufford area.
Suddenly John’s junior’s marriage to Winnifred Spendley is not at all surprising, but it leaves me wondering what was behind the migrations back and forth between Ufford and North Cockerington. I have not been able to trace the Martin family further back in Ufford, so was North Cockerington their original home? Unfortunately the North Cockerington parish register goes back only to 1646, so that cannot help me.
What I would like to find out is:
Were there other connections between North Cockerington and Ufford?
Did both manors belong to the same family?
There are connections with gamekeeping in subsequent generations and that leads to further peregrinations at the bidding of the Monckton family, who had estates in Northamptonshire and Leicestershire, so did the Monckton family own land in North Cockerington?
Or did the Martin family have their own connections in both areas? Clearly John the parish clerk was educated to some degree, so they may have been of yeoman status.
I would be very interested in contacting anyone with an interest in the history of the village who may be able to throw light on this.
