About Bolsover?
BOLSOVER, a market-town, township, constablery, and parish 6½ m. S. by E. from Chesterfield, and 155 m. N. by W. from London, in the hundred of Scarsdale, and archdeaconry of Derby. The parish consists of the township of Glapwell and the villages or places of Oxcroft, Shuttlewood, Stanfrey, and Walley. The township of Bolsover contained in 1821, 228 houses, 228 families, 604 males, 641 females or 1245 inhabitants. In 1801, 1091, and in 1811, 1043 inhabitants. Of the 228 families, 128 are chiefly employed in agriculture, 70 in trade or handicraft, and 30 in professional pursuits, &c.
The town was formerly celebrated for its manufacture of steel buckles and spurs... Tobacco pipes is now the only manufacture carried on here.
The market-day was formerly held on Friday, but is now fallen into disuse. There is a fair held on Easter Monday. The town is under the government of a constable and headborough...
The Duke of Portland is lord of the manor, and holds court at the Swan Inn on the Friday, every three weeks, besides two great courts within the year.
(from Glover's History and Gazetteer of the County of Derby 1829)
Glover was not to foresee the growth of Bolsover as a coal-mining town from the 1880s onward. For just one hundred years it has seen itself as such. Before that, mining had been carried out in the area for centuries, but it had always been subsidiary to farming. In the mid-nineteenth century Bolsover was a small, rather decayed market town, providing those services which were needed at a very local level. For anything important, people would travel seven or eight miles to either Mansfield or Chesterfield. It probably never served many more parishes than those immediately adjacent to it - Clowne, Elmton, Scarcliffe, Sutton-cum-Duckmanton.
Sitting prominently on the edge of the Magnesian Limestone Ridge Bolsover actually lies in Derbyshire although it must often have felt more part of Nottinghamshire, not least during the Civil War when it was held for the King by the Earl (later Duke) of Newcastle, his Commander for the Northern and Midland Counties. Looking out westwards over Chesterfield to the Peakland Hills of largely Parliamentarian Derbyshire, its Castle was a major military base until captured by the Roundheads in August 1644. Newcastle had spent lavishly on re-building it in the earlier years of the century and had staged the most sumptuous entertainments there for King Charles I.
Pride goes before a fall however and the Castle declined from then on. Newcastle's heirs as lords of the manor, Earls of Oxford and Dukes of Portland, retired to their comforts at Welbeck a few miles away. (As Welbeck is in Nottinghamshire, many archives relating to Bolsover have found their way into Nottinghamshire Archives.) Bolsover's more recent pride, its pits and Coalite plant have also fallen, leaving the town back on its heels as it approaches the twenty-first century.
The parish of Bolsover is fairly large, pushing out long fingers of land to the north and east to include the hamlets of Oxcroft and Whaley respectively. It has a detached portion, Glapwell, to the south on the other side of Scarcliffe parish. On the plateau east of the ridge is good rich soil for arable farming, though at 500 feet above sea level the crops come rather late. Down the scarp slope is the old common waste of Shuttlewood, the subject of many a mediaeval dispute, as its timbers were in demand not only for building but also to make charcoal for smelting the iron which was mined just across the valley of the little River Doe Lea.
Note on the Manor of Oxcroft
Some Bolsover residents today associate the name Oxcroft with Oxcroft colliery which was in the north-west corner of the parish, but that is a relatively modern use of the name. The pit-head, if not the underground workings, were nearer to the hamlet of Stanfree than to the old hamlet of Oxcroft. Oxcroft is shown on maps and documents as late as 1779 as a separate Manor, though no known Manor Court records exist. A late mediaeval document called the Customary of Bolsover includes a section headed the Customary of Oxcroft whose text implies that the inhabitants of Oxcroft were subject to the "custom" or jurisdiction of Bolsover Manor Court, but also had some independent rights. A survey of 1652 states that "Tibshealf, Oxecroft, Goosehouses and Biggin make one entire township." Now the first three of these places are all several miles from Bolsover, so the township designation must have been an administrative convenience.
For our purposes, since Oxcroft is within the parish of Bolsover, we must often look for its inhabitants in a separate list, usually in the seventeenth century headed "Tibshelf and Oxcroft", while most Bolsover residents are listed under "Bolsover", or "Bolsover and Clowne".
Bolsover Surnames - How the list came about
This list started from my own family history researches. My mother's parents, bearing the surname Cree are from Chesterfield, but we quickly found both Cree and Handby roots going back to Bolsover, while the earliest generations of Crees were traced to Oxcroft. As we delved deeper we found a number of Cree families in the general area, spreading to Mansfield, Worksop and Newark just over the county boundary in Nottinghamshire, and to Beighton and Eckington and on into Yorkshire to the North. To sort out who was who, it developed into, and still continues as a one-name study, and all Cree individuals in the north-east Midlands now fit somewhere on a family tree that is rooted in a 1643 marriage in Bolsover parish church. But that is another story...
We also found that my Cree grandfather's mother had come from a long-standing Bolsover family, the Handbys. When we started to unravel all the inter-connections between Bolsover families, we gradually found we were amassing a vast collection of information about them. There was no choice but to be completely thorough about it, so every Bolsover family related to mine had a file and then every person with a connection to the town was recorded. Thus was Bolsover Surnames started.
A few existing lists have been incorporated. The records of the Bolsover Manor Court have been well kept and as each heavy volume was completed, some diligent clerk would compile a name index. I know what he went through and am grateful for his anonymous effort, which I have been able to merge into this list. Joan Smedley's index to the 1871 Census has been included, as have my own earlier indexes, Bolsover Wills at Lichfield and the name index to The Diary of Benjamin Granger of Bolsover from my article Bolsover Families in the Journal of the Derbyshire Family History Society.
In case anyone should think of emulating this work by producing similar lists for other localities, I should point out that the labour has been substantially reduced by the use of modern computer technology. A standard word-processing package can not only merge different lists but can also, joy upon joy, sort the lists into alphabetical order at the touch of a key.
Scope of the surname list
It was tempting to extend this list to include parishes surrounding Bolsover. However there was no easy place to draw the line other than the parish boundary itself. So this is primarily a list for Bolsover.
The Manor of Bolsover is a different jurisdiction to the parish, dealing with matters of land tenure and minor misdemeanours of its inhabitants. The Manor, confusingly, includes a part of Clowne parish, and excludes a part of Bolsover parish, the detached township of Glapwell. Place names included within Bolsover are Oxcroft, Shuttlewood, Stanfree, Coppice, Bolsover Woodhouse and Whaley. All these will be found on the Ordnance Survey 1:50 000 map, an invaluable aid to genealogists and local historians. Occasionally the valley leading east from the town centre is referred to as the Hockley Valley.
So people have been included in Bolsover Surnames if they lived in any of these places in Bolsover, or if it appeared that they might have done, or if they had some strong connection with the parish such as ownership of land. Some archive sources consist of lists of people from, say Bolsover and Clowne, or Oxcroft and Tibshelf. Where an archive source names individuals from Bolsover and another parish then people have been included unless they are known to be of the other parish. If people appeared at the Bolsover Manor Court they will normally be included. Quite a few residents of Clowne, and a smaller number from other places will thus have crept in.
As for time limits, I originally thought I would go up to about 1800 as documentation starts to become more plentiful then. But access to the fine collection of trade directory extracts in Bolsover Library and the discovery of Joan Smedley's excellent index to the 1871 Census persuaded me to include these later documents. In doing so I have become inconsistent, for there are many other nineteenth century archives that I could have indexed. All I can say is, I had to stop some time and make the whole thing available to others. If it proves useful I can always extend it in a future edition.
Two major sources for family and local historians have not been included in this index.
The first is the Bolsover Parish Register. To index this would be a significant undertaking. The original register was very untidily kept for much of its early history and a large section has gone missing. Much but not all of the missing part is covered by Bishop's Transcripts. It seems that many of the entries from both the PR and BTs have been included in the Mormons International Genealogical Index (IGI) on microfiche to which readers are referred. It is available in most large public reference libraries and at Family History Centres of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Be aware that IGI entries need thorough checking against the original archives, of which they are, after all, only an index. The 1992 Index appears to contains about 50 per cent of the Bolsover entries.
The second source not included is the Census, apart from Joan Smedley's index to the 1871 Census which has been merged into the list. Microfilms of the census returns for every year from 1841 up to 1991 (at present) can be consulted at the Family Records Centre in Myddleton Street, London. They are also available at Local Studies Sections of the Public Libraries in Chesterfield, Matlock and Derby. The 1881 Census has been indexed as part of a major national project and the index for Derbyshire was published in 1995. I am not aware of any indexes to the Bolsover census returns for other years. It takes a couple of hours to search right through the whole of the Bolsover returns for one Census year.
The prime purpose of Bolsover Surnames is to provide a pointer to references to a particular name. From the previous section it will be clear that the occurrence of a name in the list is not proof of residence in Bolsover. Readers are strongly urged to follow up the reference given, where they will sometimes find more information about the person listed.
First use the key above to look up the surname you are interested in. Then note down the references given: generally a three-letter code, a date or a year, and sometimes also another figure.
Next look up the three-letter code in the Sources section. Here you will find a description of the archive source in which the name occurs. The date you have noted may be important in locating it within the archive. The further figure may be a page number, folio number or a volume number. This is explained in the Sources section. The Repository (Record Office) where the source can be found will also be named. Note down its name also. (A few sources are published books or journals. These may be available through your local public library. They are probably all available in the Local Studies Sections of libraries in Chesterfield, Matlock and Derby.)
Finally look in the Record Offices section to find the address and telephone number of the Record Office.
You will then need to make arrangements to visit the Record Office concerned. It is worth planning to spend most of a day there and you will need to phone to book a table or microfilm or microfiche reader. The archivist will be able to advise which.
If you are unable to visit the Record Office yourself, the staff may be willing to do the research for you or you may employ a professional genealogist or record agent to do it for you. Either way you will have to pay for this service. A letter to the Record Office will enable you to obtain an estimate of how much they will charge. Alternatively many of the archives have been microfilmed by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and the films may be ordered through their world-wide network of Family History Centres (for use in the Centre only).