Researching my family history has been my ongoing project for the past fifteen years. Parish records, census details, and records of births, marriages, and deaths have helped paint a picture of my ancestors’ lives. The Wills of my earliest forebears have also been very helpful. They have confirmed family members and given an insight into their lives and the priorities and sensitivities of their writers.
I have been very fortunate to trace my Gregory family ancestors back to the early 1500s. However, my knowledge of them as individuals goes back no further than the memories of those alive during my lifetime. It is challenging to find anything about the human story behind the names, dates, and limited facts of even my great grandparents.
The wealthy, educated, famous or infamous may leave portraits, documents, letters or even biographies that can give us a greater insight into their lives. Sadly, none of my ancestors falls into any of these categories.
The rules of common law inheritance or primogeniture had continuously resulted in the eldest son in the family inheriting his father’s estate up until 1925. In 1799, my 4th great grandfather, Lemuel Gregory, his father’s fourth son, was only left a modest inheritance and no land to call his own. From at least the early 16th century, my Gregory ancestors were minor land-owning farmers in Leicestershire and Derbyshire until the early 19th century. Lemuel was the last of my direct male ancestors to farm in either Peckleton or Desford.
Primogeniture was finally abolished, by the British Parliament, as the governing rule in the absence of a valid will in 1925. It had been a common-law right since the Norman conquest of 1066.
Despite the limited detail available, researching my ancestors’ lives has proven challenging and rewarding. I have focused on the facts currently known about each generation, reserving my observations about their lives for the latter part of each chapter. I have not included any comment about living members of my Gregory family, other than myself, to maintain their privacy.
Proving continuous ancestral linkage to working people who were alive from the reign of Henry VIII onwards has been a very protracted process. I have taken great care to check the facts. Still, I am conscious that the increasing availability of digitised data may prove me to be in error in some cases.
I am sincerely grateful for all the assistance I have received in preparing this book from many other family history enthusiasts. My thanks to all those that have contributed and any I may have failed to mention for their contributions.
However, the responsibility for the text and any mistakes it may contain are mine alone.
David Gregory 2025
