The Shropshire Froggatts showed a marked propensity for marrying within the family. This is an article I have written (first published in the Shropshire Family History Society Journal) which summarises the incidences of this trait.
Even after railways opened up the country around the middle of the 19th century, people travelled relatively little before the days of the motor car, and therefore tended to find marriage partners from within their local communities. Given the rural nature of most of Shropshire and the sparse populations, it is inevitable that this would lead to instances of husband and wife being fairly closely related. I am sure, therefore, that all hardened Shropshire researchers have instances of cousins marrying somewhere in their ancestral lines.
I wonder though if any of you have come across quite as many occurrences of this as I have in my research of my mother’s maiden name, Froggatt. Very early on in my Froggatt research I telephoned Tenbury Wells District Registrar’s Office to follow up the marriage of my great grandfather, Thomas Henry Bray Froggatt in 1896, as I did not know the maiden name of his wife. I expressed surprise when the registrar gave the bride’s name as Annie Helen Emily Froggatt. "Oh yes", she said, "the Froggatts were famous for marrying other Froggatts - they were doing it all the time". Little did I think how right I would later prove her to be!
It turned out my great grandparents, Thomas and Annie, were first cousins. I later found that Annie’s only sister, Theodosia Clara Froggatt, married another first cousin, Thomas Froggatt, in 1890. This latter Thomas Froggatt’s mother, Clara Georgina Froggatt, married her second cousin, Henry Froggatt, c. 1860, while Henry’s sister, Helen Froggatt, married in 1865 her second cousin, Elias Richard Froggatt, the father of the aforementioned Annie and Theodosia!
It goes on! Henry and Helen had a sister, Charlotte. She married Thomas Adams (not Froggatt!), but then her son, Thomas Henry Adams, married in 1883 Mary Ann Froggatt, his first cousin once removed. And Henry and Helen had another sister, Catherine. She married Edmund Davies and had two children, John Henry Davies and Theodocia Sarah Ann Davies. Brother and sister, John and Theodocia, married a sister and brother, Alice (1880) and Elias (c. 1886) respectively, and guess what - yes, they were Froggatts, more first cousins once removed! Not only that but this Alice Froggatt and Elias Froggatt were sister and brother to the Mary Ann Froggatt mentioned above. Now Mary Ann, Alice and Elias were the children of James Froggatt and Anne (née Poyser); they had seven children, three of whom died in infancy - so what of the seventh child, James - yes, you guessed it, he married his cousin (genuine first cousin, this time), Annie Froggatt, c. 1875.
So that’s eight marriages of first cousins, second cousins or first cousins once removed in the space of about 36 years! All were descendants of Elias and Mary Froggatt and their sons, Thomas and Elias, the family moving to Shropshire c. 1775, from the Lichfield area of Staffordshire, via a short spell at Yarpole, Herefordshire,. But even that’s not the end of the story as they had another son, John Froggatt, who married Mary Froggatt, in Birmingham in 1795. There seems little dount John and Mary were closely related - they are likely to have been first cousins, though I have yet to confirm that to my satisfaction.
And that isn’t the only way the Froggatts kept things in the family. Thomas Froggatt, the aforementioned son of Elias and Mary, married Elizabeth Norgrove in 1800. She bore him six children, but died in 1811. So Thomas promptly married Elizabeth’s sister, Theodosia Norgrove, who bore him a further nine children. And then two sons of Elias (Thomas’s brother), namely Elias and Isaac, married sisters, Charlotte and Lucy Chatham, in 1823 and c. 1835.
The Church believed that man and wife were "of one body", and therefore for a man to marry his deceased wife’s sister was equivalent to marrying his own sister, which was incest. What Elias did in marrying his deceased wife's sister was therefore illegal at the time. But he was not alone, for some fifty-odd years later, my great great grandfather, Thomas Froggatt (father to the Thomas Henry Bray Froggatt that I mentioned in the second paragraph) married a Bray sometime between 1861 and 1866 (not sure whether her name was Susan or Emily). She died and in 1866, Thomas married her sister, Helen Bray. They got married in Gloucester, far from where they both lived at the time, presumably to escape detection!
Can you imagine what the Froggatt family tree looks like when I draw it out? I have linked the duplications caused by these inter-marriages as dotted lines - it looks like Clapham Junction!
Thank goodness for modern transport!
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