Jean Payton wrote... >>I have two members of my family tree that I am researching from Yorkshire. BUTTERFIELD, Benjamin b1548, Halifax. He had a son named Benjamin b. 1572 in Ovenden who married Susan WOOD b. 1578 and they had at least two children Benjamin b. 1612 and a daughter Susan Wood Butterfield b. 1595. Benjaman married Ann JUNDON of Motlen, Essex, England. I have all of their descendents here in the States but I have a huge gap between the time the Butterfield Family came from Normandy in the year 1157 and settled in Yorkshire area and 1572. No info prior to that. Maybe you could tell me how to research them from here in the US or at least give me a few tips on how to research these ancestors that are so far back in England.<< CONGRATULATIONS, Jean! If you have managed to get back to 1548 then you are much further back than most of us can manage, so you should be patting yourself on the back! You are fortunate in that Halifax is one of the very few parishes that has original registers dating right back to 1538, when they were first ordered to be introduced into the Church of England by Thomas Cromwell, chief minister to Henry VIII. Halifax, though only a modest-sized town, was once the largest parish in Britain, covering around 30 townships. I happen to know the town very well, since I was partially brought up near Halifax as a teenager and had my very first job in journalism there on the local newspaper. You may perhaps not be aware of this, but Halifax is famous for an old Yorkshire saying - "From Hull, Hell and Halifax the good Lord deliver us." This was known for centuries as the "Thieves' Litany". It arose because Halifax was notorious for having a guillotine-like instrument called a gibbett (a device used for executing people with a descending blade, long before the French Revolutionaries discovered it) which was used to lop off the heads of anyone caught stealing cloth worth more than 13 and-a-half pence. The cloth trade was vital to the town's economy, being the staple industry, so stealing it was a capital offence. The guillotine was used to execute criminals for other offences as well and was still in use up to the time of Oliver Cromwell, but even he found it so barbaric that he ordered it to be abolished. Somewhere on the web in the GENUKI pages you will find a full list of the people executed on the Halifax gibbett. I believe the port of Hull didn't have a gibbett, but was equally hard on criminals, so both were towns that the ill-doers steered clear of! Now back to your query. Forgive me asking, but what makes you think the Butterfields came from Normandy in 1157? It would help to know. The name derives from a place called Butterfield, which I have so far been unable to trace but it is in West Yorkshire, according to Reany & Wilson in A Dictionary of English Surnames. The first recorded mention of the name according to them is in 1199 in Buckinghamshire. If you have some medieval evidence of your family's existence, then you need to be looking at very old documents like Pipe Rolls, manorial court records, etc. These are in county record offices, so you would have to get someone to search for you. You don't find this kind of thing online. Of course, if the family held some land or property you have a much better chance of finding something. Peasants and ordinary people were little recorded in medieval England! Roy Stockdill Editor, The Journal of One-Name Studies The Stockdill Family History Society (Guild of One-Name Studies, FedFHS) STOCKDILL PREST YELLOW BOLTON WORSNOP GIBSON MIDGLEY BRACEWELL SHACKLETON BRADLEY MOODY in Yorkshire North & West Ridings MEAD YOUNG in Somerset, Wiltshire & Gloucestershire Web page of the Stockdill Family History Society:- http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/roystock ”Never ask a man if he comes from Yorkshire. If he does he will tell you. If he does not, why humiliate him?" - Canon Sydney Smith (scholar and humorist 1771-1845)