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COUSINS, Watton-at-Stone, circa 1700 August, 2012 |
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Michael Cousins (m.cousins24 @t btinternet.com) write from Lavenham, Suffolk: My 7th Great Grandfather was Jonas Cousins. He married an Elizabeth Burton at St Giles, South Mimms on the 8th October 1704. The record from the Hertford Records Office shows him to be a 'husbandman' which I understand to be an agricultural worker who rents land. Further records show him to have three children christened at Watton-at-Stone, the eldest being Thomas in 1706, followed by Elizabeth (1708) and John (1710).
I have trolled through the Records Office at Hertford looking for christening records for Watton-at-Stone from 1659 to 1700 but with no lock. I have no idea where Jonas was born or why he was married at South Mimms but would be grateful for any suggestions as to how to proceed.
When you were at HALS did you look at records such as window tax and manorial records which would have given clues as to whether there were people called Cousins living in the Watton area before about 1700. I know there are some manorial records surviving from the period - although it is possible that they are in Medieval Latin - and you might find the handwriting difficult. (By 1700 most manorial documents were written in English, but some kept to the earlier Latin found in older records.) The point is that when the kind of record you would ideally like to exist cannot be found you need to look at alternatives (HALS has an excellent book, Tracing Your Family History in Hertfordshire, to guide you on the kinds of documents they hold).
If there were no Cousins recorded as living in Watton before about 1700 it would seem that Jonas did not come from there. A check of www.familysearch.org shows that the Cousins name was not common in Watton-at-Stone in the period when the Jonas Cousins who married in 1704 might have been born - so it is necessary to look further afield. The best candidate is a Jonas Cosins, baptised at Steeple Morden, Cambridgeshire on 11th October 1678, the son of Jonas and Frances Cosins. Steeple Morden is a small village on the Hertfordshire/Cambridgeshire border near Ashwell. If you look at the familysearch site you will find that Jonas had a brother called Chapman and at least two sisters.