If you can trace your ancestors back to Woodbury, Whitestone, Tedburn St Mary and Cheriton Bishop (all in Devon) then there is a DNA breakthrough. Situated in mid Devon, Tedburn St Mary, Cheriton Bishop and Whitestone are fairly close to Spreyton where there was a known branch of the Winkleigh Gidleys (those who have the well-known Bartholomew Gidley on their tree), It seemed reasonable to suppose that they were an offshoot from that tree. And I think that in the distant past I read on a long disappeared website that there was an oral tradition in their family that Bartholomew Gidley had walked to London to make his fortune.
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| Cheriton Bishop, Toll House |
However, it is now cetrtain that there is no shared male ancestor with Bartholomew Gidley at all (his haplogroup was entirely different). The tree I call Woodbury, Whitestone and Kent shares a common ancestor with the Gidleys from Chudleigh, Dean Prior and Cornwall, the closest being Chudleigh, where a common ancestor was likely to have been born around 1630.
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| Tedburn St Mary, Little Chapel |
For more recent ancestors, if they lived (or still live) in Loughborough, Stoke on Trent, St Paul's Cray and Dartford in Kent or in Somerset, then this is very likely to be your DNA match. It also applies to ancestors in places where there are/were members of more than one branch, for example, Portsmouth, Tiverton, Torbay, Exeter and Islington, so not all Gidleys who lived in those places.
I'm not an expert on Devon economic history, but many Gidleys seem to have moved from mid Devon to the south of the county, where there were all the maritime activities, like fishing, the naval dockyard, etc. The earliest ancestor for the Woodbury, Whitestone and Kent branch was a John Gidley who married Grace Rouden in 1745 in Cheriton Bishop, and was buried in 1789 in Tedburn St Mary, very close by. I did find it interesting that a man (or his immediate forebears) we now know was from South Devon should have bucked the trend and moved over 30 miles north to Crediton. He was described as a yeoman of Crediton in 1775.
Eric Gidley from the Chudleigh branch has come to the conclusion that his ancestor John Gidley who died in 1884 in Kangaroo Flat, Victoria, Australia is most likely to be John Gidley, christened in 1790 in Dean Prior, Devon, son of James Gidley (1762-1830) and Susanna Hodge. I had tentatively identified this John as the one who was buried in Stoke Damarel in Devon in 1837, of Boot Lane, aged 48, so I looked for another John of approximately the right age to substitute. There are dozens of baptisms for a John Gidley but there are never enough when a specific year is needed, and all the others born about 1788 - 1790 were already allocated to trees. It is pretty obvious that there were many, many baptisms never recorded. A burial in Stoke Damarel, being so close to Plymouth, may be of a John Gidley from another part of the country, London, for example, although there isn't one in my database.
The Gidley DNA project is growing gradually, but we still need more (male) participants), so do please volunteer, especially if you are from the USA. It does need to be a FamilyTreeDNA test for Y-DNA, and not Ancestry, though if you have matched with other Gidleys on Ancestry it would be interesting to know.
Finally, a big thank you to Alan Gidley who bravely tested and ended up grappling with the tariff confusion for sending his test package to the US at the Post Office earlier this year, but persisted.
