2009 started with a bang!! Following on from the discovery of the online records of The London Gazette, I decided to  follow up several sets of references in that newspaper  to the following cases in Chancery: ‘Edge v. Newbon’ (reported n 1803 and 1804), and ‘Murray v. Newbon’ (1860). I quickly found out why no trace of the first case had previously been found at The National Archives: it is listed as alternately ‘Edge v. Newboy’ and ‘Edge v. Newton’! ‘Murray v. Newbon’ is correctly listed, and so it is unclear why it has only just come to light!

‘Edge v. Newbon’: the children of Walter Newbon in the Court of Chancery (documents at TNA)
The case, referring to the will of Walter Newbon (1750-98) has proved to be a treasure trove of family documents relating to the Newbon family, the main set of documents (C124/393/1) comprising 30 separate documents, some including extremely detailed family information. The most interesting snippets of information gleaned are as follows:

A further document (C103/170), of 1805, is the deed of settlement of Walter’s will. It is exceptionally beautiful, to the extent that it must be viewed under supervised conditions!

‘Murray v. Newbon’: the  children of Charles Newbon in the Court of Chancery (documents at TNA)
The set of documents relating to this case can be found in C15/770/M56. [As of November 2009 they are fully transcibed - a transcript can be viewed here.]

The article I unearthed in the London Gazette of July 17th 1860 states:

This was the first reference I came across to Charles Newbon’s  business in St Swithin’s Lane. The most interesting snippets of information gleaned from these documents so far are as follows:

The Will of William Owen Feltham
William Owen Feltham, the son of Sarah Feltham (nee Newbon) and her husband William  died on December 18th 1858. One the grant of probate following his death he is referred to as ‘ formerly of Castle Street, Leicester Square in the county of Middlesex, cheesemonger, and late of Killbourne Terrace, Commercial Road, Peckham in the county of Surrey’. His entire estate, amounting to effects of under £1500, was left to his widow Amelia Sarah Feltham (nee May), the only person mentioned in the will.

1911 census
Following the launch of http://www.1911census.co.uk I have been able to track down a number of Newbons in 1911, although several were wrongly indexed under the surname NEWTON!

Joseph Newbon
An Internet search revealed that Joseph Newbon was a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Walter Ingledew Newbon
An Internet search turned up a notice of Walter Ingledew Newbon’s baptism in 1864 in the Gentleman’s Magazine. This mentioned an uncle of his mother Ellen as having the surname Ingledew, thus revealing for the first time the origins of his unusual middle name.

‘Murray v. Newbon’: the  children of Charles Newbon in the Court of Chancery (documents at TNA)
February was spent following up my January findings at TNA, photographing the documents I had unearthed so that they could be transcribed at home.

Newbon and Cruse
Through a Guild of One-Name Studies contact who is researching the surname Cruse I have been able to find out some more details of two marriages on the Newbon family tree.


April 2009
‘Murray v. Newbon’: the  children of Charles Newbon in the Court of Chancery (documents at TNA)
I have now transcribed the first document from this case and hope to be able to add a transcript to the website shortly, although this will require a little bit of updating of some pages. This document gives some fascinating insight into the daily lives of Walter Henry Newbon and his father Charles Newbon in the 1840s, 50s and 60s.


May 2009
The Brockelbank family
I have been e-mailed a wonderful selection of documents by a descendant of the Brockelbank family living in the USA. Among them are two portraits of Thomas Brockelbank, the father-in-law of James Shelton Newbon, and two pictures of Thomas’s beautiful home at Westcombe Park, Greenwich, now long since demolished.

One other image sent is a photograph, almost certainly dating from the 1870s. The sitter is a gentleman in legal robes. My theory is that this may possibly be Joseph Newbon, the son of James Shelton Newbon, and thus a cousin to the Brockelbanks. The photograph was taken by C. Hawkins of Brighton and it is know that Joseph Newbon spent some time in Brighton around this time.

The apprentices of Walter Newbon
Looking through the records of the Bakers’ Company at the London Metropolitan Archives revealed that Walter Newbon (1750-98) had two apprentices during his career. The first, John Berry, became his apprentice on September 4th 1775, just a few months after Walter had been granted the freedom of the City of London. The second apprentice, James Dixon, was bound ten years later on September 5th 1785. James went on to become a freeman of the Bakers’ Company in 1800. There is just a chance that he was a relative of Walter’s wife Ann, whose maiden name was Dixon.

Joseph Newbon and the Bakers’ Company
Looking through the pocket books of the Common Council of the City of London revealed that Joseph Newbon was a liveryman of the Bakers’ Company at the time he served as a councilman in the late 1870s.


July 2009
James Shelton Newbon in Blackheath
I was very excited to be contacted through this website by the author and historian Neil Rhind. Neil is a noted authority on Blackheath, where James Shelton Newbon made his home prior to moving to Elms House, Hammersmith, and has published a number of invaluable books on the area. Blackheath was also the home of James’s father-in-law Thomas Brockelbank and other members of the family of Ann Newbon, James’s wife. In due course I will be adding full details of James Shelton Newbon’s life in Blackheath to the website.

Bank of England stocks
I spent a fascinating day at the Bank of England, looking through their stock ledgers. A number of other documents had strongly suggested to me that the Newbon family more than likely transacted financial business at the Bank of England, which was just up the road from their Blackfriars home. In particular, one document concerning the Chancery case of ‘Newbon v. Edge’ contained a number of financial statements of exactly how much certain amounts of 3% Bank of England annuities would have been worth on specific dates. This made a search of the Bank of England ledgers relatively straightforward, and the transactions of Walter Newbon and, after his death, of his widow Ann were easily found. Slightly more surprising was the fact that stock was still being bought and sold in the name of William Newbon, Ann’s first husband and Walter’s distant cousin, up until 1800, 27 years after his death! This stock would have passed at his death to his widow Ann, who must have kept the account in her former husband’s name for convenience, or there may have been a clerical error - by contrast, after Walter’s death in 1798 his stock account was immediately transferred to Ann’s name. As well as the Blackfriars Newbon family, a number of transactions can be found relating to the Rev. Richard Newbon.

3% consolidated annuities were only one of many types of stocks available from the Bank of England, but they were one of the most popular, with a guaranteed annual return. Click here for a detailed account of the Bank of England holdings relating to the Newbon family.


August 2009
Bank of England stocks
A second day at the Bank of England revealed that the family’s finances, as one might have expected, were particularly healthy in the early and middle years of the 19th century. Many members of the family held and traded 3% annuities at some point with money passing between different family members of a number of occasions. The largest sum of money held was £21, 000, stock which James Shelton Newbon owned for a time with two other men. This was worth the equivalent of £1¼ million of today’s money! The records from the 1760s showed that a James Newbon, baker of Grays Inn Lane had a stock account at this time, but his identity has not yet been determined. Possibly he was the son of James and Mary Newbon and the younger brother of William Newbon. Possibly he was the uncle of Walter Newbon, who was born in Fotheringhay in 1717 but thereafter disappears from the records.

Camden Local Studies Centre
Although I failed to find James Newbon among the rate books of St Andrew, Holborn (the parish in which Grays Inn Lane was situated in the 1760s), I did stumble upon one Laurence de Rippe. Given how unusual this name is, this may well have been the husband of Mary Newbon, the daughter of Walter Newbon of Fotheringhay - both Mary and her husband were mentioned in the court records of the manor of King’s Cliffe.

London Metropolitan Archives
If James Newbon were the son of Richard and Mary Newbon, other members of this family may well have lived near to him in the parish of St Andrew, Holborn. After Richard Newbon’s death, Mary married Benjamin Prior, also a baker - a Mary Prior was indeed buried at St Andrew’s on July 25th 1756. If Benjamin Prior is to be found among the rate-payers of the parish, it would seem likely that James Newbon was his stepson. Several burials of members of the de Rippe family can also be found among these records.


October 2009
Walter Newbon - an obituary
At the London Metropolitan Archives I followed up the Bakers’ Company records of Walter Newbon’s apprentice James Dixon by looking at James’s City freedom record from November 1800. This stated that James was the son of William Dixon, baker of Redbourn, Hertfordshire. It seemed to me even more likely that there was a family connection here, otherwise how would the Dixons of Redbourn have known the Walter Newbon of Blackfriars? The one other possibility seemed to be Redbourn’s location, north of London. Possibly the Newbons took this route on their way to and from their family village of King’s Cliffe in Northamptonshire and stopped at Redbourn?

James Dixon’s apprenticeship became somewhat complicated because of Walter Newbon’s death in 1798, although why he was still an apprentice so many years after being bound in 1785 is not clear. By an extraordinary chance James’s City freedom indenture of 1800 contains the following writing on the reverse of the document: ‘A good man. Dyed Nov.e 10 1798 about 7 o’clock in the morning. By his family much lamented. Bakers’ Hall 24th November 1800.’  This can surely only refer to Walter Newbon, who was buried in the church of St Andrew-by-the-Wardrobe on November 16th 1798!

Ann Newbon (nee Dixon) - a major find
It seemed worth trying to find out if there was indeed a family connection between the Newbons and the Dixons of Redbourn. The National Archives website showed 3 PCC wills of Dixons of Redbourn. The first appeared to be that of the apprentice James Dixon’s father William, who died in 1788, although James was not mentioned in the will. The second (the will of John Dixon of 1791) proved to be one of those extraordinary finds that only come along once in a blue moon! The will contained the all-important phrase: ‘I give and bequeath unto my daughter Ann Newburn wife of Walter Newburn of London baker the sum of twenty pounds.’ Thus a new ancestral line for the Newbon family and a fascinating glimpse into their connections!

In addition to Ann, 3 other children are mentioned: another daughter Elizabeth, the wife of Thomas Barton, shoemaker of the Borough of Southwark, and two sons, William (deceased - presumably the father of the apprentice James) and John. Elizabeth Dixon was mentioned in the will of William Newbon, Ann’s first husband in 1773, when she was unmarried. The IGI reveals that she and Thomas married at Redbourn in 1775.

Thomas Dixon’s will reveals that he was a ‘victualler’, i.e. a seller of food and drink. He may well have owned a coaching inn at Redbourn, since his will contains the following information: ‘....all that house known by the sign of the George in Redbourn together with all yards gardens stables barns buildings with all the presmises and appurtenances thereunto belonging or in any wise appertaining all which being copyhold.....’  

What we know of Ann’s story thus far is as follows: she was born in about 1743, possibly in Redbourn. In 1772 she married William Newbon in Blackfriars, when she was listed as a spinster of the parish of St Martin-in-the-Fields. There is no indication of how she came to be in London. Her sister Elizabeth married in Redbourn 3 years later in 1775 and her father John was still living in Redbourn when he died in 1791. Possibly John’s family moved to London for a time and then moved back to Redbourn between 1772 and 1775 (maybe after an inheritance?), or possibly Ann moved to London on her own while her family stayed in Redbourn throughout. If the Newbons did travel through Redbourn en route to King’s Cliffe it may be more likely that William and Ann met at Redbourn? We know from the manorial court records of King’s Cliffe that William did make this journey from time to time - indeed, he died at King’s Cliffe in 1775.

The next step will be to track down the baptisms of John Dixon’s children.

John Dixon
On a visit to Redbourn the George Inn was easily found, still licensed under the same name! Redbourn is a beautiful village, which did indeed lie on the ancient Watling Street. Between 1790 and 1860 there were up to a dozen coaching inns along the High Street, until the arrival of the railway changed the nature of transport for ever.





































November 2009
Arthur Henry Newbon - d.1918
Ancestry.co.uk has added to its records Irish WWI memorials. Among those included are details of Arthur Henry Newbon, who was a lance-corporal in the Northumberland Fusiliers (Tyneside Irish). The Commonwealth Wargraves Commission website had already revealed that he died on April 8th 1918 in France, and it is now known that he died of his wounds rather than being killed in action.


December 2009
Frederick Ernest Newbon - d.1917

Ann Newbon (nee Dixon)
A visit to the Hertfordshire County Record Office in Hertford unearthed the baptism of Ann Dixon on October 9th  1743 in Redbourn. In addition to the name of her father John, the records showed that her mother’s name was also Ann.