Dear Peter, Thanks for your answer. I doubt myself that the lady is in the right place withWoodchurch and I presume that Hook is a fairly common surname, but you never know with these old family traditions...there may well be a grain of truth in it. I shall tell you a story to prove my point :-) : Back in the early seventies, when I started my family tree, my grandparents were all dead, so my aunt took me to visit my great-aunt Emily, whom I'd never met before. She was a lovely lady and told me a lot about her family. One thing in particular stuck with me though: she showed me phots of her and her sisters when they were young. They were beautiful, very dark hair and tanned-looking skin. She said that they were very often thought to be Spanish because of this..... And then proceeded to tell me that her father's great-grandfather was a Spanish gardener who had run off with a lord's daughter. Well, I've always been a bit sceptical by nature and took it with a pinch of salt and anyway I'd already traced back the requisite number of generations to know this couldn't be right. Time passed, Aunt Em died and I carried on.... Now, although all my Back family (Aunt Em's and my maiden name) were very poor right back to the Benjamin Back who died in Woodchurch in 1757 "in the poor house" , I found to my astonishment that his grandfather and great-grandfather had actually been lords of the Manor of Raymonds in Wye (just north of Ashford). There was my 'lord'! Then I found that another of our ancestors was John Gardiner, who died in Woodchurch in 1738, and owned the house by the original Wesleyan Chapel. There's our Gardener! Now, the Spaniard...well, there was a family called Spain in the village, late 18th- early 19th, from whom my paternal grandmother is descended, so not an ancestor of my Aunt Em...unless well, you never know! I'm working on that part! There's a few illegitimate births in the family then. And if they are called Spain, there is probably an original Spaniard somewhere back there. So although my aunt's story wasn't entirely correct, I shouldn't have discounted it altogether, !!! Don't you just love family history, never know what you'll find!!!!....... Best wishes, Josie