In a message dated 01/06/2007 03:13:49 GMT Daylight Time, [email protected] writes: He married a Grace Robson on the 31 Oct 1682 at Whickham Durham England. I have no idea of his parents. If Edward Seymour (etc) married in 1682 then there seems a good chance he was born during the "Commonwealth period", between the end of the Civil War and the Restoration of the monarchy (roughly, the very late 1640s and all the 1650s). During that period many of our local parish registers were not well kept and there is no doubt that very many (probably most) of the children born during the 1650s were either not baptised at all, baptised but not in a church approved of by the authorities or were indeed baptised in the C of E but either the event was not recorded in the parish register or, if it was, then the register has not survived. Your first step should be to decide whether the non-local, and probably originally Scottish, surname of Seymour was present in Whickham parish in the 1660s, something that could be done by referring to the Hearth Tax Returns of the 1660s. The originals of these are in TNA but Durham County Record Office, and probably Tyne and Wear Archives, have copies covering their own districts. Be careful to read up about the Hearth Tax first, because there are several sets of returns, some being of those who paid (solvents), some of those who did not (non-solvents), some of Assessments, not what was actually paid and some of Arrears! Not all types of return exist for every year and only heads of households are listed. If there are no Seymours in Whickham, you could check adjacent parishes (Ryton, Lamesley and Gateshead in Co Durham and all four of the Newcastle parishes in "Northumberland"). If a likely Seymour family is found in Co Durham (and even if not), then you could look at the Protestation Returns of 1641. They are arranged by parish and the Co Durham ones have been conveniently printed by the Surtees Society. They amount to a listing of all able-bodied males aged over ?16 (or between 16 and 60?) and are the nearest you will get to a 17th-century census. Roman Catholics refused to take the Protestation, but the list of those who took it is followed by a list of those who are being reported for refusing, so if someone is not on one list they will be on the other. Another Surtees Society publication is the "Proceedings of the County Committees for Compounding with Delinquent Royalists", and covers mainly the early 1650s. I am not so much suggesting that your Seymours were wealthy Royalists as that they might possibly have rented a cottage from a major land-owner who was. Some of the delinquents' estates are given in detail, down to "one cottage at XXX, in the occupation of XXX at XXs per annum". A further angle on this is to recognise that Seymour is probably a Scottish surname and at that time Scots on Tyneside were either (a) keelman, many of whom were Edinburgh-based, travelling to Tyneside for the summer and returning to Edinburgh each winter (the coal trade was seasonal at that time) or (b) among either the Covenanters' Army which crossed the Tyne at Newburn in 1640 and then camped at Whickham before entering Newcastle from the south or with the later Scottish Army which laid seige to Newcastle in 1644, after which they again occupied the City. Personally I would suggest that an origin with a keelman's family is more likely. In that case you should perhaps, after checking out Whickham, look hard at Newcastle All Saints parish, as Sandgate, in that parish, was where many were concentrated. The story is that when the Hearth Tax was first imposed, in the early 1660s, the collectors met with a solid refusal to pay when they went to Sandgate. Indeed, the keelmen rioted and kept the inspectors out of Sandgate altogether. Their argument was something like "We are all Scottish, so we shouldn't have to pay English taxes"! However, later Hearth Taxes were collected and there is a printed list of all Newcastle households that paid in 1665, compiled by Richard Welford and printed in Archaeologia Aeliana, 3rd series, Vol 7, pp49-76. That book was published about a century ago and is now fairly rare but you might find one in a reference library. Geoff Nicholson