Caveats and Observations

Caveats/Observations

In deciding whether to use place of birth/residence/death as an indicator of relationships, note that:

• Leonards who were farmers tended to remain in one community or nearby for multiple generations (e.g., Cambridgeshire Leonards).
• Leonards who were merchants and shopkeepers tended to remain in the same area (shire) for generations (e.g., Bob’s Bristol/Somerset/Gloucestershire Leonards).
• Leonards who were iron refiners tended to move around, depending upon where there were furnaces/foundries/forges that were operating.

In deciding whether to use the spelling of Leonard as an indicator of family relationships, note that:

• Spelling was not standardized in the 15^th-19^th centuries, and clerks applied their own phonetic rules to their spelling of names, and not necessarily consistently at that.
• Most Leonards (and most people) were illiterate in the 16^th and 17^th centuries and couldn’t have corrected the spelling if they recognized an error.
• Leonard may have been given a French pronunciation in the 15^th and 16^th centuries, dropping the “d” sound at the end.
• Some Leonard families used aliases as a further means of identification in the 1500s and 1600s, such as de Quinton, Edmondes, Lennarth, Wright or Write, etc.
• French was the language used in court and among the nobility until the reign of Elizabeth I, while English was spoken among the common people.

Given names tended to run in families, but some given names were very common among all, such as John, William, James, Thomas, Henry, and George. Some given names were rarer and tended to be used in particular branches, such as Daniel, Walter, or Lawrence.

• Surnames were sometimes used as given names to honor a distinguished paternal or maternal ancestor in that branch or to take pride in the family’s ancestry.
• Some naming conventions were followed, such as naming the first son after the paternal or maternal grandfather. These conventions tended to die out by the 1800s.
• Greater variety in naming children seemed to take hold in the 1800s and 1900s.

Most families in the 1500s, 1600s, 1700s tended to be large if they survived. James Leonard 1620-91 had 65 children and grandchildren at his 70^th birthday party in 1690. Perhaps that was unusual, in that childhood mortality reached 50% and parents were frequently dying young. When a plague (e.g., smallpox) came through, sometimes whole families were wiped out. Families in the 1800s were also large, but with more children surviving due to public health and medical advances. These and other social forces led to smaller families later in the 1800s and 1900s.

Iron refiners – masters and journeymen fyners – and skilled craftsmen (e.g., gun barrel makers) tended to be well-paid, as much as ten times the wage of an unskilled laborer and sometimes with housing provided. Entry into these occupations required a long and substantial apprenticeship. One did not decide at age 30 to become a fyner.

• Sons frequently followed their fathers and uncles in the occupation.
• Children were one’s retirement, so their success was important.
• Compulsory primary education did not occur in the United Kingdom until the 1870s.

Primogeniture was the general rule in inheritance, with the oldest son receiving the bulk of the estate. Wills were frequent where substantial sums and titles were involved. The remaining children were left to their own devices.

Religious differences and wars over them had a major impact on migration in the 1500s and 1600s. The St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in France in August 1572 resulted in a large number of French Protestants being killed and much of the remainder migrating abroad.

The British Civil War 1642-51must have had a substantial impact on the ironworking Leonards. Furnaces/foundries/forges were destroyed to keep them from supplying the other side. Crops were laid waste; cities and villages were plundered; people were killed in battles and indiscrimantely.

British policies and attitudes toward emigration varied between encouragement and discouragement over the years. Immigrants with desired skills were encouraged to come to England as a means of importing new technologies.

It is probable that more than one branch of Leonards immigrated from France/Belgium in the 1500s and possibly into the 1600s to promote the growth of iron refining. One shouldn’t assume that only one branch with but one progenitor accounted for all of the ironworking Leonards in the 1500s or early 1600s. There is little evidence yet that the ironworking Leonards who appeared in the west of England (e.g., Black Country, West Midlands) either migrated from Sussex in the southeast of England or came directly from France.