Go to our own ATTERTON family page

The ATTERTON Family Genealogy Archive was begun in 2000 in an attempt to find where my great-great-grandfather, who was married in the City of London in 1811, actually came from.

This genealogy resource consists of (1) a complete list of the Birth/Marriage/Death entries for ATTERTON as given in the General Record Office Indexes for the years 1837 to 1901 (births) and rather later for marriages and deaths [see also below], (2) parish register entries for very many parishes, mainly in the south, east and midlands focussing on the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and (3) detailed census entries from 1841 to 1901.

• The ATTERTON Archive Master File (in Excel format) has recently been expanded from a 1000+ record file to 6000+ (so an average of about six records per person - birth, marriage, death, census and other records) in order to show more detail and make it all easier to follow.  Incidentally, it also makes the gaps more obvious and this should prove an incentive to digging more deeply!  The new file runs to nearly 400 pages and there is still a lot of polishing to do, including double-checking the names as recorded and adding source references.  This will take time but if you would like to know more about using the information to speed your own research, do please send me an e-mail.

During the period covered by this research, there were fewer than 200 ATTERTONs living at any one time.  Over the 150 year span from 1750 to 1900, only about 1000 people, including wives marrying into the family, carried the name.  Varying amounts of detail on nearly all these are to be found in the archive.

At the turn of the seventeenth century - 1700 is our present approximate cut-off point - there were four identifiable groups of ATTERTONs in England.  There are earlier records and it may ultimately be possible to tie in some of these but, since most of the ATTERTONs were in the middle and lower echelons of society, that could be difficult.  Historically, one suspects that some of them had a link to the village of Atterton in Leicestershire but, as far as I know, no such evidence survives. 

1.  SUFFOLK   In 1700, the largest concentraton of ATTERTONs in England, but still only a few families, was found in a cluster of villages around Kersey, to the east of Sudbury in Suffolk.  The earliest known record from the Sudbury area (Boyd) dates from 1570.  In 1711, an ATTERTON couple appeared in Wixoe on the River Stour, some ten to fifteen miles to the west.  These soon moved to the neighbouring Stoke by Clare, which becomes the focus for a new family group.  Over the next hundred years, some of the Stoke branch moved south across the river into Essex, but by 1900 almost all had moved far away, mainly to London. The last of the 'Kersey' group left the area in the 1850s but the name ATTERTON survives to this day in an engineering business in Haverhill, not far from Stoke, its founder dying in 1929.

Two references indicate that a link existed between a Kersey family and north-west Essex as late as the early 1800s.

2.  BEDFORDSHIRE   Records go back in the Biggleswade area of Bedfordshire, with interruptions, to 1597.  There were two ATTERTONs, probably brothers, farming there in 1680.  Both had large families but the male lines did not survive locally.  The name disappeared in this county when the last surviving female died in Potton in 1871.  There is a probability that ATTERTONs found from 1758 in Chatteris in Cambridgeshire, thence spreading to Stamford in Lincolnshire, and from 1766 in Bulwick in Northamptonshire belong to this group.

The marriage of an ATTERTON lass from Sandy, Bedfordshire in 1777 to a young man from Glatton, Huntingdonshire, where an ATTERTON, born in Chatteris, Cambridgeshire, owned property in about 1800 cannot be coincidence.  The name Nathaniel, carried by several of the Bedfordshire ATTERTONs, as head of family in the earliest record in Bulwick, once again, can hardly be ignored.

3.  NORFOLK   The distinctive Norfolk ARTHURTON name is found to-day in numbers comparable to all the ATTERTONs countrywide.  One Norwich line, previously using an ARTERTON form, emerges as ATTERTON on moving to Colchester in Essex in the early 1800s.  An ATTERTON line which appears in London in 1811 also has links with Norwich.

4.  NORTH YORKSHIRE   Two families are found in 1800 near Guisborough, about ten miles east of Middlesbrough.  Records have been found locally dating back to 1758 and, just across the River Tees in County Durham, to 1683.  Some detailed research is found here.

And ... LONDON    There was no obvious cluster of ATTERTONs in London in the years immediately preceding 1796.  However, between then and 1820, the names of about ten ATTERTONs are found in marriage records.  So where did they come from?  We recently tracked down two of them.  Some must be related.  Most seem to have taken lodgings when they arrived, so were recorded as being 'of this parish' when they began to put down their new roots.  It remains for us to find where they all fit in.

It is well-known that names were frequently spelled as they sounded (with consequent variations) up to the time of compulsory primary schooling in 1870.  As a result, variations in spelling in earlier years were most likely to occur in the vowels or with crossovers between the 'd' and 't' sounds.  In the later part of the nineteenth century, however, new handwriting forms for certain letters emerged and some of these have caused problems ever since.  In the Victorian copperplate handwriting, a common way of forming the letter 't', in which the 't' looks like an 'l', causes considerable confusion.  This example, which comes from a single record in the 1901 census, exemplifies the difficulty often faced by the modern copyist.  We have found over twenty ATTERTON mis-spellings in the census transcriptions.  And an admission ...  I often write some of my t's like l's, a characteristic picked up from my Victorian father!

Surnames in their own right, which are sometimes confused, include ATHERTON (originating in Lancashire), ALLERTON (Lancashire, Yorkshire and the Suffolk Coast) and ALDERTON (predominantly Suffolk).  For information on the much less common ADDERTON name, go to www.adderton.co.uk.  Mis-spellings have been found all ways.

The following surnames are on record as having married into the ATTERTONs (maiden names):
(in both lists, the names underlined appear on my own ATTERTON family page)

A few more names discovered recently will be added shortly.

Aires, Alder-Barrett, Aldridge, Allden or Alden, Allen, Alston, Ambler x2, Atterton, Bartholomew, Barton, Bartrup, Beck, Beckett, Bell, Benson, Bertram, Bixby, (Bonney), Brant, Brazile, Bridge, Brooksby, Byflet, Byford, Cadwallader, Calvert, Cameron, Canham, Cannell, Catley, Chapman, Chilman , Church, Clark, Coggin, Coles, Complin, Cooper x2, Cotes, Cudby, Dartch, Davies, Dawson, Deacon, Difford, Duckett, East, Edwards, Eggleston, Egle, Eyres, Field, Fincham, Francis, Gewley, Gibbin, Gill, Granville, Green, Gregory, Grimwade, Gullick, Hadfield, Harris x2, Harrowing, Healey, Hiles, Hitchcock, Hodge, Hubbard, Hughes, Hunt, James, Jarman, Johnson x2, Jones, Jordan, Kirtley, Knowlson, Knox, Limming, Lincoln, Ling, Mackrow, Mallyon, Martin x2, Masters, Mears, Meylan, Millard, Mills, Millwood, Mitchell, Morris, Neville, Newman x2, Nunn, Pearce, Pemberton, Percival, Pink, Povey , Purkis, Radkin, Rawlings, Rawlinson, Reeves, Restell, Richardson, Robertson, Robinson, Rose, Rout, Sanderson, Sayers, Shaw, Shepherd x2, Shrimpton, Simmons, Skeeles, Skiles, Smith x4, Spreadbury, Steevens, Styles, Taverner, Taylor x2, Thomas, Thompson, Wallis, Watson, Webb, White, Whitlock, Wiggins, Wild, Wilde, Wise, Witt x2, Woodger, Woods, Wrenn, Wright.

The following surnames are on record as having married out of the ATTERTONs (married names):

Allen, Atterton, Bacon, Bannow, Barnes, Bettesworth, Birch, Blackburn, Boughton, Bowerman, Bradfer, Brown, Callaway, Catlen, Christie, Churchill, Clark, Cornell, Cotton, Coulter, Craddock, Currans, Curtis, Deverell, Dobson, Dunn, Durrant, Dyer, Ellson (Elsom), Galer, Gant, Gerrard (Jerrard), Gilbert, Gregory, Gun, Hardy, Hargreave, Hemmings, Hickford, Hills, Hitchcock, Hoane, Howes, Hughes x2, Jones, King x2, Leak, Livingston, Longstaff, Lurkins, Mantle, Marsden-Smith, Mitchel, Moody, Moore, Morris x2, Morrison, Mortlock, Muckell, Newell, Nicholls, Nunn, Parmiter, Payne x2, Peck, Pentecost, Pipe, Playle, Priest, Ray, Reeves, Rispin, Roe, Rogers, Rook, Routledge, Ruggles, Scurrah, Sherwood, Skinner, Smith, Sparkes, Stanbury, Storer, Suttle, Symon(s), Thompson, Thurston, Trigg, Vendy, Waddingham, Wall, Walls, Walsham, Warren, Warth, Wheater, Wilcox, Wilkin, Wood, Wroe.

All ATTERTON references in the GRO Indexes, together with some variant spellings, covering the period 1837 to 1901, are to be found on line (E&OE) on the FreeBMD website.  My own lists include the names of known spouses, also many post-1901 marriages and deaths.  If you would like to know more about these references or the parish and census information on file, please send me an e-mail.

The family website at www.atterton.org.uk is currently dormant.

PLEASE share any firm information you may have about your own ATTERTON family and the results of your own research.

At a later date, when more work has been done, it is hoped to place copies of the ATTERTON Archive in the relevant County Record Offices.  No material concerning those born after 1901 would be included here.

Post Script       If you have arrived at this website through your genealogy research into the names ADDERTON or ALDERTON or ALLERTON or ALTERTON or ANDERTON or ARTERTON or ARTHERTON or ARTHURTON or ATHERTON or ATTERLOW or OLLERTON or UTTERTON then you may not be interested in the ATTERTON family.  While these are all surnames in their own right, many names have been transcribed incorrectly in censuses, on websites, in the IGI, etc., and even original records contained mistakes - no man is perfect!  However, all these spellings have been found as either mis-spellings of ATTERTON or the other way round.  Please get in touch as we may be able to exchange our wrong spellings!

By the way, after six years' work, I am still hunting for my g-g-granddad's baptismal record.

 GL                                                                              26 Nov 2001, 5 Apr 2003, 14 Apr 2004                                                    Last revised 8 May 2006
Re-formatted on 2 Sep 2006

If you have found a connection or just suspect that you may link up somewhere or have any other comment, please send me an e-mail .  If you find an error, however small, please also let me know.