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No – not the Stuart royal couple, but our very own William and Mary Blyth (or Bly, or Blye; sometimes even Blythe or Bligh – they weren’t fussy about spelling back then) who were born about 50y ears after the Stuart monarchs died. They are my 3rd great grandparents, and a few years ago I visited the small village of Scarning and delightedly stood in the little church where they were married on 24th October 1786. The churchwarden told me that apart from the pews, little had changed in the church over the years, and the font was the one in which their children would have been baptised, and they would have knelt at those very altar steps on their wedding day.

William’s ancestry posed a problem for many years – Percy Garrod had traced us back thus far and no further, and my cousin Philip Blyth had posited a connection with the Blyth family of Easton, just a few miles from Scarning. But the fact remained that while the apparent birth date of William Blyth of Easton matched our Scarning William, and we couldn’t find any trace of a William Blyth (or Bly etc) baptised in Scarning, nor a marriage, burial or any other record of what happened to William Blyth of Easton, the theory that he was born in Easton and moved to Scarning was just that – a theory. Until DNA! I found a match to someone who was descended from Robert Blyth of Easton, and have since found several matches descended from the Vout or Vought family (Robert’s wife was Ann Vought). And Robert and Ann were the parents of the William Blyth we had long suspected of being ‘our William’. SO now we had proof in the form of DNA. Interestingly, Robert’s mother was Elizabeth Burcham (or Birtcham) and I am just noticing at least one Burcham family living in Scarning in the late 1700s – William’s cousins possibly? That could indicate a family link to the village and a reason for moving there – more research needed…

However and whyever he got there, William was settled in Scarning for the rest of his life. Records of the time do not include profession but I assume he was a farm labourer as that is how his sons began working life. William and Mary had nine children, all of whom they faithfully (and thankfully for family researchers) had baptised in Scarning Church, where many of them also married. Most of this generation seemed happy to remain in the village: I have not found records for Robert, William,

John died aged 5 in 1799;  Mary, Elizabeth and Ann married shoemaker Charles Barker, Robert Kenney and bricklayer Benjamin Spilman respectively: they all lived in nearby East Dereham. Sarah married Christopher Cordy in Scarning, Thomas, from whom I am descended, moved to Greesenhall and Yaxham and the youngest son Edmund died in Scarning aged 23, around the same time as his father.

While we have the burial records for both Edmund and his father William, I found no trace of their graves in Scarning churchyard when I was there. Mary died in 1831 and was also buried in Scarning churchyard, but her burial record gives her ‘abode’ as Gressenhall, suggesting that after William died, she was living with her son Thomas, who had moved to Gressenhall as a husbandman. Given that Thomas married just a few months after William’s death, it is therefore more than likely that he and his new wife Elizabeth lived in the family home with Mary and she moved with them to Gressenhall.