Scant family history has been passed down through the generations and it is this that has prompted the attempt to compile a history of the Tilburys. Ted Hockings suggests that the reason so little knowledge of our ancestry has been handed down is that, traditionally, the first son of each family inherited the family fortune and the other sons joined either the army, the civil service or the church. The tradition was broken by adventurous sons who preferred to travel to Australia than adopt the traditional lifestyle. Very little contact was maintained with the families remaining in England.
Acknowledgements
Details of the Tilbury lineage have been gathered from numerous sources and grateful thanks are extended to Ted Hockings, Nick
Vine Hall, Clive Edwin Tilbury, Lloyd Geoffrey Tilbury and Prof. Ralph Blacket.
Special thanks are extended to the Hon. Justice Robert Hope, who offered the eulogy to my father in May 1993 and in so doing provided the impetus for this book by making me realise how little we as a family knew of the Tilburys and how much less the next generation would know.
Spellings of the name, especially before 1770, vary enormously. For example, the International Genealogical Index (IGI) for the town
of London shows the first spelling of TILBURY in 1630. This was preceded by TYLBERY (1550), TILBERIE (1619) and TILBURIE (1629). In the 1600s the spelling was predominantly TILBERY with variants TILBERRIE,
TILLBERY and TILBERRY. In the 1700s TILBARY was introduced, along with TILBARRY, TILBURRY and TILBUREY. In the 1800s the spelling was predominantly TILBURY, with one TILBERRY in 1811, one TILBORY in 1828 and two TILBARYs in 1864 and 1865.
It is worth noting that these spellings can vary in the same generation of the same family! The reason for this is best explained by
P.H.Reaney:
“The man who says his name was always spelled as it is today is talking rank nonsense. The modern form of very many of our surnames is due to the spelling of some sixteenth- or seventeenth-century parson or clerk, or even to one of later date. It is not a matter of illiteracy in our sense of the word. These parsons who kept the parish registers were men of some education. Their ability to read cannot be questioned, but they had no guide to the spelling of names. It was the printing-press which gradually established a
recognised system of spelling.”
TILBURY is an old English (Anglo-Saxon) locality surname derived from ‘Tila’s Burg’ (Fort), Essex. Early records of the
surname Tilbury or a variant date to the 13th century, where there is an entry of the name Richard de Tillebyr of county Essex recorded within the Hundred Rolls in 1273. The Hundred Rolls system of local legal jurisdiction was introduced by King Edmund I (939-946AD) and, until the 19th century, was a unit of English Government detailing citizens of a given area. James
Thompson Tilbury once told his daughter Esther (Ettie) that the Tilbury name was originally de Tilberrie and that a Charles de Tilberrie sailed the Seven Seas in bygone times, perhaps as a pirate, or even a hero with Drake...
Local surnames from English place-names are not numerous in early London sources. In the early thirteenth century, local surnames gradually became more numerous and by the end of the century were common and still increasing. Most of them, in the 12th and 13th centuries, came from the counties round London, but in the 14th century there is a marked increase of such surnames from farther afield, particularly from the East Midlands. It is noteworthy that the south-western counties produced very
few.
Tilbury is a former urban district (in 1931 the population was 16,825) in South Essex, England, on the north bank of the Thames and 22 miles east of London, opposite Gravesend. Industries include shoe manufacturing. The extensive docks are included in the Port of London and are the terminus of several passenger shipping lines. Some Tilbury descendants are of the belief that a Tilbury ancestor designed and built Tilbury Docks, which they named after him.
Tilbury Fort, begun under Henry VIII, was later rebuilt and strengthened. In 1588 Queen Elizabeth held a celebrated review here when the Spanish Armada threatened England. The present docks, begun in 1886, were heavily bombed in World War II. In 1936 the Tilbury urban district was included in Thurrock.
Document Notes
The document is in its early stages of development and the following points should be noted:
- Any information that can be provided to add or change any details, or provide a source for further investigation, will be very gratefully received; discrepancies and points requiring further information are noted throughout the document and will (hopefully!) be removed as more information is gathered.
- The document is structured such that the chapter numbers follow each generation in the line of descendancy. Of each generation it is the direct ancestor of the current Tilburys that becomes the subject of the following chapter. With this structure there is a certain amount of overlap of detail, when events are important to both a parent and a child, or to two siblings.
- Many of the paragraphs of each chapter may feel stilted. Until more information is gathered the facts have been laid out in purely factual form.
- Where wording has been difficult to interpret or questions need to be answered, a question mark has been inserted or the query placed in square brackets.
- The siblings of Thomas Tilbury (c1802-c1876) are based on the presumption that Thomas and Ann (nee Durden) are his parents, though no certification has been obtained at this point to establish that link. Nor is there any link to the previous generation of Thomas and Jane Rudman, except that of pure conjecture based on dates of birth and marriage.
