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From: Roy Stockdill <>
Subject: A Christmas tragedy in 1676
Date: Sun, 1 Oct 2000 06:12:44 -0400


THANKS to the numerous people who sent me messages about my posting
yesterday on my discovery of an entire family of six who were buried
together on Christmas Day 1676, described in the parish registers of Kirkby
Malham in Yorkshire merely as having "Perished" with no further information
except that they were vagrants.

I also posted this to the YORKSGEN list and a friend of mine looked up a
book he has, "Agricultural Records AD 220-1997" by J M Stratton. This
apparently reveals that in the winter of 1676 there were high wheat prices,
a dense fog in October and heavy snow from December 10th onwards. Thus,
speculation must be that this sad family died from a combination of
starvation, exposure to the open and hypothermia.

Where was the Poor Law Relief system, you may ask? Well, under the
Settlement Act of 1662 if you arrived in a parish to occupy a property
worth less than £10 the overseers of the poor could have you removed by the
Justices of the Peace and constables back to the parish where you were
legally settled. A vagrant family would probably not have a legal
settlement anywhere, since no-one wanted to take responsibility for them
and allow them to become a charge on the parish, thus they would probably
have been shuffled from one parish to another.

Times were hard then!

Roy Stockdill
Editor, The Journal of One-Name Studies
The Stockdill Family History Society
Web page:- http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/roystock
”Never ask a man if he comes from Yorkshire. If he does he will tell you.
If he does not, why humiliate him?" - Canon Sydney Smith (scholar and
humorist 1771-1845)

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