Dear Mike

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I’ve picked out a couple of sentences in your reply below in yellow, and broken up the email into chunks.

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People acquired surnames for all sorts of reasons through history.? James Irvine wrote the majority of the section on the ISOGG Wiki about NPE’s.

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I would just point out these reasons, which usually we do not like to think about too much.

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·??????? Apprentice or slave: youth taking surname of master

·??????? Tenant or vassal: man taking surname of landlord or chief

·??????? Anglicisation of gaelic or foreign name: man taking translated/phonetically similar name

·??????? Formal name-change, e.g. to inherit land: man taking maiden name of wife or mother

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Informal name changes, the use of aliases and by-names, and name changes by tenants, vassals, apprentices and slaves were prevalent in the 13th-18th centuries, in some cases before surnames became hereditary, and in this latter context, strictly speaking, they are not NPEs. Similarly, a genealogical mistake is not strictly an “event”, but this too can be manifest as an NPE.

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I’m reflecting on the origins of the 2,800 American Tryons in 1840, who seem to go back to one man or two men, who you claim lived in Gloucestershire or Hertfordshire.? In practice, those two counties are some distance away from each other, certainly back in time like 1500-1600.? With the advent of BigY-700 testing and appropriate DNA recruitment, you should over time get a much better handle on when these groups separated from one another.? Maybe they just lived on lands owned by the more wealthy Tryon families from Northamptonshire and adopted their surname.

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I’m not sure where your former collaborator lived in England, but that can make difference as to what can be accessed relatively easily.

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It is clear from the most cursory search that there is a well-known Tryon family in Northamptonshire that is well documented, and as you know well.? What I then did was search the TNA Archives (Discovery) catalogue for all references to the surname Tryon between 1500 and 1750 – and that turned up 331 references.? I can break those down further and get these clusters of documents.? You can also vary the search years of course, and get better breakdowns of the documents by time.

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This is a large number of Chancery Proceedings.? They can be packed full of detail, but this level of listing in even outline detail has only been possible relatively recently.? And even then, for some periods of time, most notably the reigns of Charles I and the Interregnum, 1625-1660, the degree of cataloguing detail is still very poor – just the surnames of the two initial individuals named in the Chancery Case (Claimant and Defendant) and a date range of 1625-1649 for Charles I – no more granularity than that.

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I would like to pretend it might improve in the future, but the lady who did the bulk of that cataloguing retired during the Covid-19 pandemic, and has not been replaced by anyone equivalent.? Instead, such cataloguing effort has been transferred elsewhere to other classes of documents.

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Tryon References

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If I search both the TNA Archives and External Archives, I get 426 hits for Tryon between 1500 and 1750.? So there are 95 hits outside of the TNA, and I would expect the bulk of them to be in Northamptonshire, but not all.

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Not sure if this will help you that much, but that is what is out there.

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Brian

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