Surname Saturday: Brooke

At last! a surname that has the largest concentration in the UK!  Next highest is Australia - but then, a LOT of UK individuals and families went to Australia at various times.  BROOKE is also one of the easier surnames when it comes to guessing its origins...and there are plenty of streams, small or otherwise, in England.  After all, don't they say that if you don't like the weather in England, wait half an hour, because it will have changed? LOL

I have met many visitors to this country who have marvelled at just how green everything is.  Er...that's because it is always raining...and the weather seems to take especial pleasure in raining on wedding days, Bank Holidays, and so on.

Anyway, back to BROOKE.  James BROOKE and Elizabeth NOTT (my ggg grandparents) were married on 19 Nov 1822 in Coldridge, Devon, with witnesses Hugh and Richard NOTT. James and Elizabeth proceeded to have eight children in the next thirteen years.  Coldridge itself provides some slight irritation for the genealogist - some people call it Coleridge, and the different spellings over the years in different censuses by different enumerators...

James was born about 1796 in Crediton, Devon.  He is an end-of-line ancestor, so perhaps I need to do some more research on him to get further back.  Of his children, Jane, the fourth child and third daughter, was my gg grandmother.  She married on 29 August 1847 (again, in Coldridge) - quite probably a Bank Holiday? I need to find a date calculator that tells me these things.  She had 11 children; the first four were in Coldridge, and then she and her husband Samuel FARLEY moved to just outside Millbrook in Cornwall. And a good thing, too, because then her 10th child and youngest daughter, Susan Emma, could meet and marry my great grandfather.

My father was so proud of being Cornish; it seems as though his ancestors started out in Devon, then migrated to Cornwall, while my mother's started out in Cornwall, then moved to Devon...and although I was born in London, I consider myself to be a West Country lass.