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When researching family history it would always be nice to find someone rich and famous. Sadly the odds against it are pretty high - even though some genealogists seem to do better than average! In the case of the Townsley families the highest point on the social ladder normally seems to have been a farmer - with many Townsleys being recorded as hawkers, tinkers or travellers as well as the ever-present labourer.
None of these social levels could be expected to be property-owners with assets to dispose of in wills or with titles to pass on to their descendants. Without the extra documentation that wills and pedigrees provide then the trail back through generations of ancestors soon runs out of written evidence.
However continued digging has recently found some links from Townsley families to the British Peerage. This is good and bad news. It is good in that there are, therefore, published pedigrees to support the basic BMD and census entries. But it is bad in that there are, potentially, large quantities of additional information that I will now be tempted to include - since many of the British noble families are linked through marriages at some point in their history; perhaps as far back as King Edward III or even earlier.
Instead I will try to stick to possible families that have been found in the archives with a good chance of having a direct Townsley surname connection. These include - Tounley, Tounsella, Tounsley, Tounesley, Towndeley, Towndely, Towndley, Townedley, Townelay, Towneley, Townelley, Townesley, Townlay, Townley, Townnsellee, Townslay and Townsly. But note that I have NOT researched the various Tinsley or Tonsley families - even though some of the coat-of-arms sellers make unsupported claims that Tinsley is the origin of the name Townsley!
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 So far the only well-documented family that could, possibly, provide the origin for the Townsley name is the Towneley family of Lancashire. However there is zero evidence to support this proposal - despite being sent this “Townsley” coat of arms by a company claiming to know my origins. It is one of the Towneley family designs. But linking to a medieval family will remain a fanciful daydream until some evidence appears - even though that does not stop me from looking!
While digging into archives I have gone through many sources, collecting up information from all around the British Isles and publishing the results on the web. There are around 5,400 entries for the Townsley surname alone in the current database.
So this is not a full, worldwide, one-name study since it makes no attempt to cover all the American families - some of which go back to the 17th century. But it does provide a very large percentage of the known British references to the Townsley surname.
This web site aims to contain, or link to, almost all of the information collected since 1997. But there is still plenty to do.....
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Status Update
Dateline: 1, 5, 7 and 11-May-2012
New releases of Townsley Family History Database
Dateline: 8-Apr-2012
Updated tree for Wales
Dateline: 7-Apr-2012
New release of Townsley Family History Database
Dateline: 30-Mar-2012
New release of Townsley Family History Database
Dateline: 27-Mar-2012
Updated tree for Castleford, Yorkshire
Dateline: 16-Mar-2012
New information added for Medieval Families and Coat of Arms
Dateline: 10-Mar-2012
New release of Townsley Family History Database
Dateline: 20-Feb-2012
New information added for Castleford, Yorkshire
Dateline: 15-Feb-2012
New release of Townsley Family History Database
Dateline: 8-Feb-2012
New information added for Burnley, Lancashire; Skipwith, Yorkshire and the References section.
Dateline: 28-Jan-2012
With just a few days to go before the closure of our “old” web hosting service it’s now time a big effort to build a better site here. The old web pages have been removed - but there is a still a lot of rewriting to be done before the new pages are up to scratch.
Dateline: 11-Dec-2011
The recent announcement by Tesco that it will be closing its free webspace in January 2012 means that all remaining web pages must now be transferred to one of my newer web sites as a priority.
Dateline: 07-Mar-2011
After many delays the web pages generated from the main Townsley Family database are now available here...
The previous pages are still online at the old location but will be removed once the Internet search engines have located the new home for them.
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