My Cottingham

Cottingham is the place I call home, where I was born, and where seven generations of our three combined families have lived since the 1600s. It is a pretty village within the Welland Valley and still surrounded by farmland. Our views from one aspect, on the road to Rockingham, are far reaching. From there, on a clear day we can see the viaduct at Seaton and Ketton Cement Works chimneys standing tall on the horizon. We have been lucky in the fact that we are not isolated as some rural villages are. Corby, the nearest town is only ten minutes away by car and provided work in the steel industry for many years for about three quarters of our menfolk. Market Harborough and Kettering are about 6 miles away. In my youth we had three public houses all within walking distance of each other, a post office, a paper and sweet shop, another sweet cum grocery shop, a Co-operative store, two bakeries and a bookmakers. Just after the second World War we had a fish and chip shop for a time. We also had a coal merchant and garage.

Cottingham has grown considerably since my childhood with many more houses. Sadly, with the introduction of supermarkets, only one shop remains, but we still have two public houses. Our school has now been turned into a private house and a new school has been built to cope with the growing number of children. But despite the many changes, our village still retains its charm and our ancestors would still be able to recognise some of the landmarks that were there more than a century ago.

I have written a full account of in the article My Cottingham on page 3a of this section.

References

1. Photograph: Cottingham village sign © Michael Trolove, on Geograph and licenced for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence

Cottingham online

If you would like to find out more about the history of the village of our ancestors, I can recommend having a look at the following site. Edited by Jane Smith, this is a wonderful resource of photographs, anecdotes and historical data of the village of Cottingham in Northamptonshire.

Jane also edits the Cottingham and Middleton Newletter. Published every other month, it features news and current events within the two villages. It has been in operation since the Summer of 2004 and back issues are available on site.

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Page added: August 1st 2020
Last update: September 30th 2021

Meet the Editors

Janice Binley, UK

My interest in our three combined families started over 20 years ago when Robert Binley, the great, great grandson of Charles Robert, brother of my great grandfather Jeffrey, contacted my mother for information for his Binley family tree. Robert had traced our branch back to 1600 to William Binley from Monks Kirby, Warwickshire where we believe our ancestors originate from. It is also possible that prior to then some of the Binleys may have come from Hampshire, but records are difficult to trace.

In the late 1980s I began a Binley tree of my own, but as I obtained more information I realised that we were very much entwined with Tansleys and Jacksons and our old family photograph album suddenly became alive when some of the names I had discovered were featured in there. From that point on it was a natural progression to include all three families in my tree in the hope that I could more accurately document and illustrate some of our past for future generations. Our ancestors still have descendants living in both villages and many other parts of England and it may help any who are interested to understand their roots and a little of how life in Cottingham and Middleton was in the 19th century.

It was during the summer of 2011 that I was put in touch with the Extended Craxford Family Web site by Irene Beadsworth (a member of another long-established Cottingham family). I had been trying to work out how we were linked to the Craxfords because I could find no trace of them through my own sources. The site mentions a lot of people that I am related to, albeit in the dim distant past. I had high hopes of two Beadsworth / Binley unions (Ernest with Grace Rosina and Ann with Edward) being the link. Then when the Claypole line was thrown into the mix, alongwith the details of the small neighbourhood of Blind Lane and Barrack Yard, the scope of the task began to emerge.

Since then, Alan and I have discovered that our respective trees have been more and more deeply enmeshed over many generations. It seems that every new addition to the database is linked in some way to both of us. Even though we are not genetically related, we have even discovered that we are both first cousins (twice removed) by marriage to the protagonists of one of our recent articles.

I was born and raised in Cottingham, as was my stepfather, Cyril Loake, before me. After he had retired in the 1980s, he jotted down his recollections of the village from the past in a notebook which he illustrated. I am pleased to be able to share his notebook within these pages. He was also an accomplished artist and his painting of the Inns of Cottingham adorns the head of this page.

Further Reading

Cottingham and Middleton, Northamptonshire Soldiers 1914-1918 Christine Blenkarn has developed and devoted a website to honour the men of Cottingham and Middleton who served in the Great War. It notes principally those who were killed in action while doing so. It also looks at the impact on their families and the local community. She has also scripted a biographical account of those Cottingham and Middleton soldiers who served in the Great War and returned home.

Downloadable A4-sized booklets with maps and descriptions of these two interlinked Northamptonshire villages can be obtaioned from Cottingham and Middleton Walks

Please contact us

If you have any questions or comments about the information on this site in general, or you have further information regarding this article, please Get in touch by leaving a message in our Guestbook. If you don't want the message to be added to the Guestbook, just say that in your text. We look forward to hearing from you.

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Family stories from Cottingham (2)

(BINLEY, CRANE, JACKSON, TANSLEY, TILLEY)

A FAMILY ALBUM: BINLEYS, JACKSONS AND TANSLEYS
"There is a village called Binley in the parish of St Mary Bourne in Hampshire which is mentioned in the tax-roll of Edward III of 1327 as Bynleigh."

THE JACKSONS, MY MIDDLETON FAMILY
"His experiences left such as lasting impression on him that he named his first daughter, born in 1918, Suvla."

THE CRANES OF COTTINGHAM. 1: Victim or Villain?
"What a terrible month it's been. First, Mam died. We weren't surprised. She's been really ill for a while now. Something to do with her woman's parts."

THE CRANES OF COTTINGHAM. 2: Those who left and those who stayed
John was Henry Crane's third son and, from the historical records, closely followed his father's example. Although the case was dismissed he had a brush with the courts as a 15 year old in 1871."

MARY CRANE AND HER 'MISBEGOTTEN' CHILDREN
She disposed of the body before she had really thought about what to do. How could the jury prove otherwise, unless several witnesses testified that they saw her kill the baby or throw it whilst still alive into the water?

THE TANSLEY FAMILY ORIGINS:
Daughter Harriet had a tragic short life. She was fifteen years of age when she became pregnant. She then married Frederick Jones in Cottingham on March 9th 1865 but died on November 1st 1865 of an unspecified fever.

THE COTTINGHAM TANSLEYS 1: Brother James and Sister Comfort
"The subjects of this particular article are James Tansley and his sister Comfort but the history of the Tansleys in Cottingham goes back more than 120 years. They were just two of the myriad three times great grandchildren of Edward the tailor and each preceding generation added many links into the other local families in the locality."

THE COTTINGHAM TANSLEYS 2: David and two of his sons who moved to Leicester
"The seed of this project was the chance finding of three references to the wills of a Tansley married couple on the same page of the Probate Calendar and the discovery that the named beneficiary did not actually appear to exist."

TILLEY: ORIGINS AND ALTERNATIVES 1: THE LANGTONS
The family name Tilley is by no means uncommon in the East Midlands and indeed we have come across four seemingly unconnected family lines in Leicestershire and Northamptonshire.

TILLEY: ORIGINS AND ALTERNATIVES 2: UPPINGHAM
Lois delivered seven children between 1882 and 1900 but five of her babies died. The first son was born about June 10th 1882 and was given a private baptism the following day. He died and was buried on June 17th 1882, the record showing him to be four days old.

TILLEY: ORIGINS AND ALTERNATIVES 3: LEICESTER
this article has concentrated on a tiny subset of the Tilley family who settled and lived in the city of Leicester. The following are just a few examples of other Tilley individuals discovered living in the same small area of the West End in the same time frame.

A HISTORY OF THE TILLEY FAMILY (Cottingham: Part 1)
In 1881, whilst the Exeter Arms and the old bakehouse were still in operation, proprietorship of the bakery had passed to another (and as yet totally unrelated) Tilley family who were descended from a line of master bakers.

A HISTORY OF THE TILLEY FAMILY (Cottingham: Part 2a)
The family of James Tilley and Martha Hector: children and grandchildren who stayed in the village and those who emigrated.

A HISTORY OF THE TILLEY FAMILY (Cottingham: Part 2b)
The family of Samuel Tilley and Mary Ann Tilley (who were cousins): their association with the Jarvis and Jarman families and how that letter came to be written.

ELIZABETH TILLEY AND THE GROCERY CONNECTION
The house was built of stone, roofed with slate and had a water supply from its own well. The shop frontage housed a grocer and general dealership.

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