Croston Family History Newsletter

In my first post: About Me- Croston Family History Newsletter , I wrote about how I got started researching my family tree. I soon discovered that my immigrant ancestors from Ireland were John Croston, who married Margaret Attridge and their son Frank Croston. They immigrated to the United States sometime in the 1850's. In addition, Ann and I researched a few other Irish families in the Boston area that shared the surname Croston hoping to find a larger family group. Through this research I became aware of 2 more Croston families that settled in the same town as my family: Bradford, Massachusetts (now part of Haverhill). No connection between the families could be found in the records, but it seemed too coincidental that unrelated families with such a rare surname, would settle in the same place at the approximate same time. Unravelling this mystery later lead me to discover where my ancestors lived in County Cork, Ireland. Haverhill is a town 35 miles north of Boston, Mas...

There are 2 theories about the origin of the Croston surname in County Cork, Ireland. The first is that they were Huguenots who settled in Ireland in the late 1600’s and the second is that the family came from Croston, Lancashire, England. Both of these theories are based on the sound of the name- it does not sound Irish and that most of the Croston early lines in County Cork were Protestant/ Church of Ireland. The Huguenots were French protestants who fled their homeland in fear of religious persecution in the mid to late 1600’s. Many Huguenots who settled in western County Cork adopted the principles of the Church of Ireland and 2 examples of these families had the surnames Dukelow (originally Duclos) and Camier. The Huguenot families lived on the same land and went to the same church as the English settlers. They were part of the same community and the groups intermarried for generations. Here the use of DNA testing has been extremely informative. The Y-DNA of 4 men: my f...

I begin the Croston story with the earliest place where the surname appears in records, with the family that took it's name from the village of Croston, Lancashire, England. It ' s not known if all Crostons in the world today have their ancestral origins in Croston, Lancashire. More research is needed to prove this, but it seems like the right place to begin. With genealogical research, you tend to start with your closest family and move backwards. This story would be more simple to tell if I was only explaining one family branch, but I want to go a step further and write about the surname as a whole. The story is more complicated than you might think- not all of the families with the name Croston are related through the paternal line, some may not be related at all; the research is still incomplete. The village of Croston, Lancashire, England dates back to the 7th century when St. Aiden, an Irish monk and missionary came to the area to spread the gospel. Before a church...

It’s taken a while for me to start this blog because there’s so much information I’ve gathered that it's hard to know where to begin. I decided just to jump in and write about what I know about the family and the stories I've uncovered. Eventually, I’ll launch a Croston Family History website which will contain family trees and other facts. My hope is that this blog will make what might otherwise seem like a list of names and dates come to life. I became interested in researching my family history around 2008 when my father gave me boxes of research materials to digitize. My stepmother Ann researched my paternal family tree in the 1980s. Her work has been invaluable as she wrote letters and spent many hours in the archives. Some of this information would have been otherwise lost to time. Before Ann began her research, our family didn’t know much about our history. Our ancestors came from County, Cork Ireland to Bradford, Massachusetts where they worked in the shoe factori...