Stooke family of Dawlish

I haven’t posted much in this blog for a while, and so was rather puzzled by a sudden flurry of new visitors yesterday, more than twice the daily average.

The reason I haven’t posted much is that we haven’t made any startling new discoveries in our family history recently, but have just been plodding along. At around this time of the year (December-January) we seem to get back to the Stooke family, and this time around seem to have been adding to the descendants of John Stooke and Mary Barter of Kingskerswell in Devon.

This is a bit peripheral to our interests, because I’m not 100%, or even 90% sure that they are related.

John Stooke of Dawlish married Mary Barter at Kingskerswell in 1808, and they had 10 children (that we have been able to trace), and we have been able to trace at least some descendants of five of those children.

John Stooke was apparently born in Dawlish in 1784, the son of James Stooke and Mary Bargeron or Barjeron or Baragon or Barrigan (there seem to be a number of ways of spelling it), who were married in Dawlish on 28 October 1771.

What is not clear is where this James Stooke came from. Some family trees identify him with James Stooke of Trusham, the son of Edward Stooke and Elizabeth Dingley, who was baptised in Trusham on 28 June 1742. While this is possible, it also seems that there were other Stooke families living in Dawlish at the time of the marriage of James and Mary, so it would be useful if we could see the Dawlish parish registers and do a reconstruction of all the Stooke families there. Unfortunately the Dawlish registers do not appear to be available online, either on FreeReg or anywhere else, nor do they appear to have been filmed by the LDS, so it would mean travelling to the Devon Record Office in Exeter to try to find them.

I’ve also been scanning some old negatives, and came across some photos taken when we lived in Utrecht briefly. When we were living there we travelled actoss to Paulpietrersburg, some 70 km away over gravel roads. I knew that my grandfather, Percy Hayes (whose mother was Mary Barber Stooke) had lived there until he died in 1948, and he is buried in an unmarked grave in the cemetery there. He used to be the secretary of the Dumbe colliery, so we had a look at it, though in his day it was at the base of the mountain, and when we visited, nearly 30 years later, it was near the top. So we drove up the mountain, and took some photos of Paulpietersburg from there.

Paulpieterburg, Natal, from Dumbe mountain, 12 April 1977