London and Cumberland

If you want to research your family tree for dates before 1837, the main online resource available is familysearch.org, website of the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, aka the LDS or the Mormons.

The Mormons assiduously collect and assemble the names of dead people. Why? Because it is a Mormon belief that people can be baptised after they have died and thereby gain entrance to heaven. So far they have collected, microfilmed, indexed and baptised about 2 billion names, and these are stored in a mountain in Cottonwood Canyon, Utah - yes, in a mountain - at a facility called the Granite Mountain Record Vault.

Strange but true.

A bi-product of all this record-keeping is a great boon to the family historian: an index of millions of records of births, marriages, censuses and burials from all over the world, made available online and free of charge. The LDS is in the process of scanning millions of microfilms so that the original documents may be viewed online in addition to the indexes, due for completion in 2012.

So, type in Partleton into the LDS site, and what do you get? Below we see a typical sample of results:

One thing that immediately comes to our attention is that these results, of the 1700's and 1800's, come from London and Cumberland... London... Cumberland... London and so on. Births and marriages which which weren't in London or Cumberland can always be immediately traced back to one of these two places.

Since the name Partleton appears nowhere else in Britain, it appears that there are three possibilities:

1. The name originates in Cumberland and spread to London

2. The name originates in London and spread to Cumberland

3. There is no connection and the names are coincidental

Let's start by being clear where London and Cumberland are in relation to each other... not close:

The Location of London is fairly well-known to most. Cumberland is a traditional (ie no longer exists) and famously beautiful county which forms the northern part of the modern county of Cumbria, the lake district, circled in red on the map above.

So, which came first? Cumberland or London?

In order to know, we will have to go back to the 1700's and 1600's. At this point, the records start getting pretty murky.

We do know that all London Partletons are descended from one man - Thomas Partleton who married Hannah Dunsdon on 02 June 1759.

As for Cumberland, the first records we have are a little earlier... the marriage of Edward Partleton to Catherine Jobson in 1730 at St Nicholas Church, Whitehaven, and the birth of Edward Partleton in 1729 in Moresby, Cumberland, son of Edward Partleton. These two events appear to be in the wrong order - assuming one Edward is the son of the other - as seems likely.

In general, there are more Partletons in Cumberland than London in the 1700's, which seems to point that this is the direction of the origin. However, it could easily be that all Cumberland Partletons are also descended from just one man - Edward - who probably would have been born about 1710.

And that's where we are. We just don't know - yet. More research required.

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