Genealogy of the Bridge family from Smarden
| Robert Bridge, ca.1735-1811, of Smarden | ||
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| James 1769-1834 James 1804-1871 Walter 1865-1958 James F. 1914-1940 N. James 1940- |
Simon 1773-1860 Richard 1799-1880 Andrew 1829-1919 Barton B. 1871-1945 Floyd C. 1901-1998 Barton C. 1926-1998 John B. 1950- |
Joseph 1787-1868 Robert 1819-1895 Walter J. 1851-1937 Cecil R. 1903-1947 David R. 1935- |
Three fourth cousins
The best thing about web-pages of family history is the way they act as fishing lines, catching new relations. When I first published these pages, I didn't know anything about John (from Indiana, U.S.A.) or David (from Sevenoaks in Kent), just some of their more distant ancestors, whose names acted as the bait!
March 2006: John visited me in
Canterbury and we got together with David for lunch in The Chequers
in Smarden. Our common ancestor Robert Bridge lived in Smarden 200 years ago but would have no
difficulty in finding his way about the place today.
Don't expect much family resemblance in the photo; brothers have half their genes in common but each step down the generations, either side, halves it again. So David and I have only 0.2% in common and John only a quarter of that. However, at least in theory, we each have the same Y-DNA.
June 2007: I attended the wedding of John's daughter Carrie in Indiana and so got to know Greg and his brother Tracy and sister Bonnie as well as John's brother Tom. Together with their various families, they outnumbered all the other Bridges I had previously met!
August 2007: an e-mail from Don Bridge of Denver, Colorado. He says 'I typed "Bridge Smarden Kent" into my web browser and what to my wondering eyes should appear, but a "Genealogy of the Bridge family from Smarden" with pictures and diagrams and all kinds of neat information.' Like John, Don is a gggg-grandson of Simon Bridge of Wittersham, but through Simon's third son William > George > Henry > Raymond > Richard > Donald. This makes him fifth cousin to John but still fourth cousin twice removed to me. Confused yet?
February 2008: an e-mail from Peter Bridge in England who alerted me to another line of descent from Robert Bridge of Smarden. He had a son Samuel, b. 1776/7, who moved to New Romney, a bit further than his older brother Simon. Samuel's only son William in turn moved to Chelsea in London and Peter is William's great great grandson (Samuel > William > John > John F > Frank > Peter). The same week I also heard from Tony Lawrence who is also descended from William, via his grand-daughter Jane. It's a small world!
June 2008: an e-mail from Michael Bridge, living in Cornwall. He is the great grandson of the Samuel Bridge who lived in Tenterden and has brought my material up-to-date for all Samuel's descendents. In turn, he learnt about Samuel's ancestors from these pages: like me he is descended from the first James Bridge, but through his first son rather than his second. We know the connection is valid because it has now been verified by a dna test.
Getting the info
My interest in family history began in boyhood when I was given
a family tree showing all the
descendants of my great grandfather James Bridge; they spread
around the world, to South Africa, South America, Australia and
eventually New Zealand. In recent years I have re-established
contacts with various branches so that this information is now up
to date, thanks to Clayton Allsop, Margaret Cox and Ros Dachs (all
of whom have visited Kent recently). 
Once I had set up this web-site, I
started to get e-mails from new relations (new to me, that is!),
two of the earliest being Greg Bridge and his second cousin John in
the USA, whose ggg-grandfather Richard had emigrated about 1842.
John sent me a mass of information from which I have extracted a
tree showing all the Bridge family in the US, descended from
Richard's son Andrew.
As chance would have it I came to live in Canterbury in 1967 and
realised that I could use the resources of the cathedral library to
look for James's ancestors, who came from Smarden in Kent. (At that
time you were still allowed to handle the original documents, some
going back to 1538.) It turned out to be harder than expected,
because four generations of the family were Baptists and so there
are few records of infant baptisms to connect the generations
together. 
I
therefore started to collect all the information available and use
it to piece together the lives of the various families. Things like
the Poor Law records can help fill the gaps and also add a lot of
incidental detail and historical interest. It turned out to be
something like a detective story,
with the odd vital clue turning up unexpectedly after years of
searching. 
Maps have an obvious use and old maps
preserve information on place-names and boundaries, in addition to
being a visual delight.
Before 1560, my main source of information is a set of wills, some in Latin, which prove there were already several families called Bregge established in this small area of Kent by 1470: one family had a house and land at "Hokyngbery" = Hawkenbury, two miles west of Headcorn village; others were based in Egerton and Hothfield. Unfortunately there is not enough information to provide a connected record, although it does seem clear the Bridge family has deep roots. Hasted's History of Kent (published in 10 large volumes, around 1800) mentions the Hothfield branch, writing that they occupied the manor of Swinford from about 1410-1630, and that they were 'descended from John atte Bregge, one of those eminent persons whose effigies are represented in the painted window in Great Chart church'. (Both Hothfield and Great Chart lie near Ashford, on the Smarden side.) Other historians mention the same window and list the figures shown but the glass itself has not survived. Surnames have been in general use in Kent since the 14th century and originally were descriptive; "atte Bregge" meant simply that John lived near a bridge.
I have sorted my data into tables which each refer to a single family unit (parents and children). It is fairly easy to do this if you can find a marriage record followed by a run of baptisms but the reconstructions for the Baptist families are less secure and supposed children may actually belong in a different family, even unrelated but with the same surname. So be aware that while individual records (rows) in the tables are based on documentary evidence, the relationships are more a matter of interpretation.
The tables contain links to preceding and following generations but navigation is simplified by using the family tree shown in a side panel; each page of tables has its own panel with just that part of the family tree which is relevant. Links to some of the main branches of the family are provided in the sidebar for this page. All the tables interlink, so once you are in one you can follow the links through to any other. I have tried to make the pages printer friendly: the table layout is more compact and the sidepanel is printed at the end. I have also put in pagebreaks to avoid splitting up entries which spread across several lines, as for a census or for images. However, this depends a lot on which browser you use. It seems to work quite well with Firefox 2.
If you want to make more space on screen for the main table you can press "Q" on the keyboard to hide the navigation panel (provided you have Javascript enabled). Press "Q" again to switch the display back. In any case, the sidepanel will reappear if you jump to another page. [A note on browsers: if you are using Internet Explorer 6.0 or older, the navigation panel will scroll up the screen with the table and so go out of view. However, with the more savvy browsers that implement CSS better, the navigation panel will stay put while the tables scroll. You want to get this effect? Of course! So upgrade to Firefox now; it costs nothing and won't interfere with your existing browser. ]
More recently, I have started to organise my collections of old photographs and other mementoes and to build up a better picture of my more recent family, starting with my grandfather Walter and my father Jim, who was killed on war service in the RAF and whom I therefore did not know.
Several things inherited from my father's sister, Anne, are interesting, notably three large photographs apparently taken by a newspaper reporter in 1945 showing Anne with the horses then still in use on the farms. There is also a needlework sampler worked by my grandmother, probably around 1890, and a small table which seems to have been made using a display panel from a Russian geology collection. Most likely this came from her adoptive grandfather A. Bozzi Granville, since it was used to store his autobiography.
Red herrings
Along with the family tree I was given all those years ago came the suggestion that Sir Frederick Bridge (Victorian composer and organist at Westminster Abbey) was a relation, though nobody knew how he fitted in. At first sight he appeared to be Kentish; however his father had moved to Rochester from the midlands in order to take up a position in the cathedral choir. It turned out that Sir Fred's great-grandfather was born in 1761 in Staffordshire, where the surname Bridge is common, so probably there is no link to the Smarden family and in any case it would be very hard to prove. Curiously, no-one wanted to claim Frank Bridge, even though he was a more significant composer (and teacher to Benjamin Britten) and also came from Sussex, just across the county border with Kent. The censuses for Brighton for 1851 to 1891 show the families of Frank Bridge, his father William Henry and grandfather William and show the last to have been born in Smethwick, in Staffordshire, about 1820. In 1841 William senior was living in Acton in Birmingham working as a bootmaker and his move to Brighton is easily explained by the hope of a more fashion-conscious clientele; in 1851 he was described as a "master bootmaker employing 2 men". So again there is no apparent link to the Kent family, nor is there any connection between Frank and Sir Frederick.
The Bridge family of Sittingbourne, Kent
In 1984 I got a letter from Margaret Reeve (née Bridge) who had been researching her family and wanted to compare notes. She sent me a tree summarising all her results, which shows an extended family in the Sittingbourne area, descended from Stephen Bridge and Jane Lithery, married 1701 in Milton Regis. There were no earlier records of any Bridges thereabouts and there is no way of telling where this Stephen came from. Milton is only 20 miles north of Smarden so the families could be linked but there is no way to prove it, other than by using a DNA test. I have converted Margaret's table to a text file. If any descendants of the Sittingbourne Bridges find this site, please get in touch!
Surname distribution
Maps showing the distribution of any surname, based on the UK 1881 census, can be generated (free) here, using a program developed at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at University College London. From this several interesting points appear. First, the names Bridge, Bridges and Bridger have completely different distributions and so even though they sound similar they cannot generally have been confused. Secondly, Bridge is a relatively rare surname in the UK, with a frequency of 224 per million. It is also strongly localised around Lancashire and in Essex, which means that it is even less frequent in Kent. Rootsmap generate (for a small charge) surname distribution maps in a rather different way, counting only heads of household in the 1881 census and analysing by county of birth (whereas CASA uses the modern postal districts). From the map and data for Bridge it is seen that nearly half the total of births from 1790 to 1852 were in Lancashire, while about 10% were in Essex and less than 3% in Kent.
These results make it all the more likely that two people with the same name living in the same area of Kent are related. In fact nearly half of the Bridge's in the 1841 census for Kent can be linked to the Smarden family, despite the returns for the West Ashford district being missing, including Smarden itself.
Genetic genealogy
I still find it amazing how our knowledge of the genetic code has grown; I was a schoolboy when Crick and Watson discovered the double-helix structure of DNA and at that time the notion of actually reading the code seemed an impossible dream. Now we not only have the complete human genome but the technique of reading the sequence of bases has become cheap enough to be routinely used as a tool for genealogy. The best known application is to use certain "markers" where a short segment of bases is repeated anything from 10 to 30 times. The exact number of repetitions varies from one person to another so a set of marker values obtained for a number of different DNA locations works like a bar-code for the individual; this is what makes it useful for forensic and police work. However, Y-DNA is passed virtually without change from father to son, so a set of Y-DNA markers does not identify an individual but rather the patrilineal family. This makes it an ideal tool for checking whether two men with the same surname are actually related.
Last year, Greg Bridge in Iowa and I both got Y-DNA tests done by Genebase and found that they match on 56 markers, proving the blood link between the two branches of the family. The results of my test are here. Except for DYS 456 and DYS 710, where Greg and I differ by one unit, the values must also apply to our common ancestor, Robert. Recently (July 2008) we have also got results for John Bridge in Indiana and Michael Bridge in Cornwall, both of whom have got results reported for 44 markers (which seems now to be standard). John, Greg and Michael are a perfect match on these 44 and I am one out (on DYS 456). Our earliest common ancestor Robert must also have had the same pattern as Greg; the difference in my result must be due to a relatively recent mutation.
If your surname is Bridge and you want to explore a possible connction with the Smarden family, please get in touch. I would like to get a surname group going; if you are considering taking a Y-DNA test, it is probably best to use Genebase since there are some minor technical obstacles to transferring results between different companies.
At the time of writing (March 2008) the main alternatives to Genebase are Family Tree dna, DNA Ancestry and DNA Heritage. Relative Genetics has now merged with DNA Ancestry. Both DNA Ancestry and DNA Heritage get their samples analysed by Sorenson Genomics. A new player is Genetree, which has been set up within the Sorenson group of companies. As the technical methods have evolved, all the laboratories now carry out the analyses on automatic machines which they buy from specialist manufacturers, so there is probably very little difference between them all in terms of the reliability of results. They all have the same accreditation from the ISO and from the AABB. They also all test the same basic range of markers, though some (including Genebase) offer markers which the others do not and there are some differences between the packages of markers on offer in a given test. This reflects the fact that for each marker there is a pair of "primers", short tailor-made strings which bind to the DNA and act as labels for the two ends of the marker. The development of primers for new markers is an area of active research and something which the different laboratories do in competition with each other.
When y-dna testing was introduced, it was possible to buy a 12-marker test - no doubt to keep down the cost. However, this has to be regarded as an unsatisfactory choice for surname-dna studies, because the chance of a false positive result is too high. This comes about because for each marker, there is usually just one common form (sometimes two), so there is a real chance that two individuals chosen from the same population group will just happen both to have all the common markers. Genebase offer a 20 marker test but this also is less useful because they don't guarantee which markers you will get, so in a comparison between two people there may only be 12 markers tested for both. So it really comes down to paying about $200 for 40+ markers; there isn't much to choose between the companies except that FTdna offers a more expensive 67 marker test and DNA Ancestry a cheaper one for 33 markers. When Greg and I got our analyses for the 44 marker test from Genebase, we both got results for 58 markers, which was very good value. This happened because their policy is to test for a wider range of markers in order to be sure of getting at least the guaranteed number but at that time at least they reported all the results.
Comparisons of results from different labs are complicated by the fact that for many markers there is no agreed standard way of counting the number of repeated units. The Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation site does a good job of explaining the problems in more detail and suggests how to convert results from one database to another. I say "suggests" because Genebase have previously denied that conversions were possible. Despite these rather depressing disagreements, the great majority of marker values seem in fact to be directly comparable and for most of the rest the conversion is well known.