© 2019 Christy K Robinson
My grandmother Opal was born a Carter in Iowa. She was part of a small family of two daughters. But she had more cousins than one can count because her father, Alonzo Calvin Carter, had 12 siblings, and her grandfather, Alonzo Jackson Carter, had 9 siblings. The next generation up had 5 Carter siblings, then the one above that had 15 children!
 |
Alonzo Jackson Carter, wife Lucetta Derringer,
parents of 13, with daughter Della May, about 1900. |
You don't even want to know the many siblings on her mother's and grandmothers' lines. I have a large computer monitor and have shrunk the pedigree screen, and it still won't fit into a screenshot.
I had my DNA tested at both Ancestry and 23andMe, and am curious about where the DNA matches they predict might fit on my pedigree chart. The DNA companies have held some rather good sales lately and I've received numerous emails saying that I had 70 new cousin matches in one company, and 200 in another. Most of those matches are fourth to sixth cousins, which are pretty far distant, considering that a fourth cousin would share a pair of great-great-great grandparents out of 32 great-great-greats. But a third cousin, while still distant with 16 shared great-greats, is more interesting because at that level, it's still possible to break down just who you got certain chromosomes from.
Adopted cousins discovering heritage
Among the Carter matches, I've found I'm 3rd cousins or closer with at least four people who were adopted and are searching for the heritage of their birth parents. One person emailed that thanks to my research, they'd been able to find the link; another person discovered her birth father's connection from the way I triangulated our mutual DNA matches and narrowed down the possibilities by emailing the distant cousins about their immediate parents and grandparents, which gave some maiden or married names that eliminated some and pinpointed others. I'm still sleuthing on behalf of a DNA cousin on my Robinson line, after I eliminated the Carter possibilities. We know the common ancestor we share because of mapping the DNA for overlaps, but we haven't learned which of the potentially hundreds of Robinson descendants might be her birth father. The few details she's been told don't seem to match with known characters. However, as more people are tested every year, it will probably happen.
Jumping the pond
One of the known Carters with whom I'm 4th cousins asked by email how I'd made the leap from colonial Virginia where the Carters were so heavily concentrated on several tobacco plantations, to the Carter homeland in Bedfordshire, England. I found it years ago, and in 2006 was able to drive from London to Bedfordshire and visit the church where they were buried and the lands where they lived. There was no GPS available at the time, so I navigated by an atlas. Finding the small city of Bedford was easy. Then I followed signs to the large church of Kempston All Saints, which is surrounded by a large graveyard, and is on a hill near the River Great Ouse. I seem to remember from somewhere that this river was one of the highways of the Danish Vikings who harried the Saxons. There were at least two great battles, in 917 and 1010, between the
Danes and the Saxons of Bedford.
The surname
The Carter name came about when people started using surnames in roughly the 1100s-1300s. Carters were the transportation companies of the medieval society. They were the domestic truckers and teamsters who moved goods by wagon or cart between countryside and cities or ports. Because it was an occupational name, we can't say that there was just that one guy... There were many unrelated men around the British Isles who were carters by trade. By 1400, almost everyone in England used a family surname. And Henry VIII, more than a hundred years later, decreed that births be recorded by the surname of the father.
But THESE Carters
My records of the Carters show a
William Carter in Barford, Bedfordshire in 1425. Henry V died young, leaving an infant son as King Henry VI, with the Duke of Gloucester acting as regent. During this time, various wealthy nobles owned the properties in and around Bedford, along with Elstow Abbey, a royal foundation.
 |
| Carter pedigree from 1781 (Charles Carter's death) back to 1425 |
My yeoman (landowning) Carters improved their fortunes when
another William married the heiress
Elizabeth Glover who owned property in nearby Cranfield. Records show that he took the name Cranfield upon their marriage, so if you look them up online, she shows up as Elizabeth Cranfield. The inheritance, along with whatever resources he held, was enough to acquire Oakes Farm about three-quarters of a mile north of the Kempston church. Besides the house he took possession of several closes, two cottages, and
70 acres of open land and meadow, perhaps 100 acres in all. William Carter died in 1569, when the manor was called Oakes Farm,
worth 2 pounds yearly, and the estate, which comprised other lands in
Kempston worth 17s.4d a year, descended to his son and heir William.
Where were these Reformation-era Carters buried? We don't know. Perhaps they were buried in the crypt of Kempston All Saints, in a family vault, or somewhere in the churchyard with no marker. I've found several Carters who were not direct ancestors, who directed in their wills of 1500 and 1544 that they be buried in the Kempston All Hallows (All Saints) churchyard.
 |
A Victorian-era report on the Bedford-Cranfield area said the crops were beans, peas, wheat, and barley.
This is a field near Cranfield. |
The next Carter was William Carter who married Mary Anscell, and beginning the Carter dynasty, he had 17 children with her. On the Oakes Farm property, they built or added to an H-shaped house of two or three stories in the
late 1500s. The bones of the house survive today despite many changes
over the centuries. Today, the house is known as Box End House; it sold for more than
£700,000 in 2015 (that's where I found the image). Carter descendants inhabited the house until about 100 years ago.
 |
| Box End House, on Oakes Farm land where the Carters lived for centuries. |
In 1977, when renovations were being made in the house, a wall painting was found on the ground floor that dated to the early 17th century. It could have been painted when William Carter was alive, or perhaps it was made by his heir. It shows a bull baiting with a charging bull surrounded by dogs, horsemen and hunters, in monochrome with the bull's and dogs' tongues colored in red.
When William died in 1605, they buried him in a vault in the floor of Kempston All Saints church, and installed a brass plate over the vault. Floor burials were extremely common in hundreds of churches all over the British Isles and Europe. If a family had social standing in the community, and money for a memorial, it was desirable that the more prominent members of the family would be buried inside the church, whether in the crypt, or under the floor tiles, or in a tomb chest with an effigy on top. If the church had relics, or it was a collegial church with monks, there were more services and masses said, and the deceased person's soul had a better chance of prayers being said for them if they were close to the action.
 |
| Churchyard at Kempston All Saints |
 |
| Center aisle of All Saints. Notice the brasses above the pulpit on the right. |
 |
| The font where Carters were baptized for at least 200 years. |
The Carter grave was located close to the front of the nave near the chancel. When I visited, I expected to find the brass plate at the front of the nave just before the chancel steps. But in the 1990s, the church floor was repaved with tile, and to conserve the brass, it was hung on the inside of the chancel arch above the podium. (See my photo.)
 |
Before the Reformation of the 1530s, the churches were, of course,
Catholic. Some were administered by abbeys, convents, or a diocese.
Kempston All Saints was commissioned by Judith, the niece of William the
Conqueror, in about 1100. Like other churches, it was built in stages
over hundreds of years. Church plan retrieved from
|
 |
| This is the couple memorialized in the brass plate found in the
Kempston All Saints Church. The brass plate had originally been placed over the
burial vault in the floor of the nave, but in the late 1990s, the floor was
retiled and the brass, to conserve it, was mounted on a wall plaque, and placed
above the pulpit. Photo by Christy K Robinson. |
“Here
lieth the bodie of William Carter Gent., who took to Wife Marie the daughter of
Tho: Annsell Esqr., by Whom he had issue Seven Sons and Ten Daughters. He died
the first day of September 1605. She surviving in Memoriall of her affection to
Him living caused the monument to be made over Him under which she meanes...”
It looks like the inscription might have once said that Mary meant to join him in the vault when her time came. She lived another 14 years, to 1619.
Considering the date of the brass, it's interesting that the clothing of the men shows the flat collar and not a big ruff of lace as was common from Elizabethan years until the 1620s. My colleague says that King James I wore flat collars, so maybe William Carter wasn't as avante garde as I thought.
Among William's and Mary's 17 children were their heir, Thomas Carter, whose descendants stayed in the area and inhabited the Box End House until about 100 years ago, and
William or Anscell Carter, who with his wife Jane and surviving children emigrated to Virginia and named their plantation Barford, after the village where many Carters had lived and died. They came to America sometime between 1631 and 1634, when William/Anscell Carter died. Jane lived another 30 years.
Down the tree, branch by branch, I have
- James Carter and Mary Brent, who owned slaves.
- Their son was Charles Carter, 1743-1781, who according to several researchers, married his first cousin Judith Carter. They had nine children in Goochland, Virginia.
- Their son was Pvt. Martin Carter, 1763-1842, who fought in the Revolutionary War and married Nancy Page. They moved to Mercer County, Kentucky.
- Their son was William W. Carter, 1800-1881, who married Phoebe Vanderipe and lived in Harrodsburg, Kentucky.
- Their son was Alonzo Jackson Carter, who served in the Civil War military at age 21 in Pleasant, Indiana. He married Lucetta Derringer in 1864, and they lived for years in Ripley County, Indiana, and had all those 13 children!
- Their son was Alonzo Calvin Carter, 1865-1950, who married Nancy Evaline Swinney. They moved to Monroe County, Iowa.
- Their daughter was Larna Opal Carter, 1897-1995, who married Leonard Robinson. They moved to the woods of Lake Hattie Township, in northern Minnesota, and purchased a log house where they were the parents of four children and an infant who died.
- One of those children was my father, Kenneth Robinson, who moved with his wife Judith to Phoenix, Arizona in the 1950s.
 |
Carter ancestor peregrinations, 1631-1957. They came from Bedfordshire, England,
to Lancaster County, Virginia (on the Chesapeake Bay), then moved west and north
until my parents moved from Minnesota to Arizona. |
When my brother married the mother of his children, her birth father's surname was Carter. I don't know how or even if they connected to our Carters, but chances are that my sister-in-law is a very distant cousin.
 |
Chestnuts I picked up from the ground at
Oak Farm in Northill, Bedfordshire. This is not the
same as Oakes Farm where the
Carters lived, but it is an ancient farm
with a guard-goose! |
*****
Christy K Robinson is author of
these books:
And of these sites:
Discovering
Love (inspiration and service)
Rooting
for Ancestors (history and genealogy)
William and Mary Barrett Dyer
(17th century culture and history of England and New England)
