Gillian Rickard’s latest publication concerns Kent people listed in ten years of the annual calendars of Prerogative Court of Canterbury (PCC) grants of administration of the estates of intestates, the PCC having superior jurisdiction for probate purposes over the south of England. The annual calendars are unpublished and are not available online, they can only be found at the National Archives at Kew.
Some 1692 persons are listed in the publication, of which several hundred were seamen on merchant ships, fishing smacks and in Royal Navy ships, and around 40 were in the Army or Militia. This was the period of the Napoleonic Wars and the same ships crop up several times, presumably the men dying during battles or of disease. Some were buried in Kent, many were not, but they all had a Kent connection at the time they died.
The burials of a large number of the intestates for whom administration was granted have been located and are listed, along with further information about them if found, such as gravestone inscriptions, newspaper reports, online books and articles and wikipedia articles. In addition, the details from the actual admons of around 20% of the 1692 have been included. The book is therefore of wider interest for the information about the many people included in it.
The people involved came from all corners of Kent and were of all ages and occupations, ranging from labourers to nobility, through tradesmen, craftsmen, shopkeepers, innkeepers and the Church. They left estates varying from £5 to £15,000 in value. A number were minors – the youngest identified was 12 years old - or married women, which was something of a surprise as one would not normally think of searching for admons for such people. The maiden names of married or widowed women were given in the calendars and have been included. This can be useful in cases where a marriage has not been found or there are several candidates for it. Some of the intestates were ancestors or descendants of famous people and some were notorious or used an alias. For some more than one grant of administration was made and these details have been included.
The book features a lengthy Introduction, which deals with many of the themes revealed in the study and the people involved and throws light on how the system of administering the estates of intestates worked in practice. There are indexes of the Intestates, Ships, Marine and Army regiments and ‘Stray’ names.
Price: £7.50, 247 pages available as a download on Gillian’s ‘stand’, called Kent Family History Research, at www.genfair.co.uk, the online genealogy shop: https://genfair.co.uk/search/?q=&s_id=74&page_id=26944