The Farndale Family Website
The Story of the Farndale
family
Farmers,
pioneers and soldiers
One Family’s Journey through
Two Thousand Years of British History
|
Return to the Home Page of the Farndale Family
Website |
The story of one family s journey through two
thousand years of British History |
The 84 family lines into which the family is
divided. Meet the historical family and how the wider family is related |
Members of the historical family ordered by date
of birth |
Links to other pages with historical research
and related material |
The story of the Bakers of Highfields, the
Chapmans, and other related families |
The Time Traveller
s Journey through North Yorkshire
The
History of the North York Moors, Ryedale, York, Cleveland and beyond |
Welcome to the website of the
history of the Farndale family
Martin
Farndale
The Farndales of Tidkinhow 1910
Joseph Farndale 1842 to 1901, Chief
Constable of Birmingham
The Coat of Arms of General
Sir Martin Farndale KCB
The Pioneer of the Farndale Genealogy John,
James, Alfred, William, George, Martin (inset) Dictum
meum pactum ( His word is his bond )
This
website tells the story of one family who travelled the path of their nation’s
history over two thousand years. We will meet individual members of the family
from the mid thirteenth century and trace backwards through the history of the
place from where they came, to the Roman and Anglo-Saxon-Scandinavian ages. We
will meet poachers in Pickering Forest, inspirers of the Robin Hood legends,
medieval soldiers, merchants of fourteenth century York and the vicar of
fourteenth century Doncaster. We will meet mariners in Whitby, travel to the
Spanish Main, and encounter the smugglers of Old Saltburn. We will travel into
industrial Cleveland and through the heart of the dark satanic mills of the
nineteenth century. You will be introduced to two influential Victorian Chief
Constables, one of whom unearthed a dynamite conspiracy. We will follow our
family emigrations to Australia, Ontario, Newfoundland, Alberta, USA and New
Zealand. We will meet soldiers including many who served in the First and
Second World Wars.
The website
will guide you through a family story but will also provide first hand individual
histories of folk who travelled through the national story. It will tell the
histories of many places, particularly in North Yorkshire.
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The story of one family’s journey through two
thousand years of British History. The place to start |
|
The
84 family lines into which the family is divided. Meet the historical family and
how the wider family is related. The place to find the family trees |
|
Members of the historical family ordered by date
of birth. The place to find an individual |
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There is now a branch of this website which
explores the history of the Baker families of Highfields, Fenton and Hasfield,
and the Dods of Cheshire, connected through the marriage of Peggy Baker and
Alfred Farndale. The place to explore the Baker family
history |
Three
Purposes of this Website
A Family
Story. For Farndales and Descendants of Farndales. The first
purpose of this web site is to make available genealogical and historical
information about the Farndale Family to descendants of the family, whether or
not they still adopt the surname.
A
Historical Journey. For Historians, Local Historians, and those with an
interest in Yorkshire and its History. This is also the story of one large
extended family and its footsteps through the history of Britain, focused on
its Yorkshire origins, over two millennia. It invites you to follow in the
footsteps of a related group of individual lives which tells the story of
Yorkshire and of Britain through time.
A
Genealogical Journey. For Genealogists. This is also a genealogical
journey which
pushes the boundaries of genealogical research, to provide the whole story of a
single family, reaching into medieval records. It provides breadth and depth,
exploring how genealogy can tell the detailed story of a family, brought alive
by stories through time.
Three Ways
to access the information
The
Farndale Story. The Farndale Story
is a hub which will provide orientation and guide you through the story of the
family. This is the best way to absorb the story.
The Family
Branches. The detailed research is provided through individual pages
providing the detailed chronology of the Farndale family divided into 84 family lines,
each of which has its own Family Tree. This will help you to understand the
extent of the whole family.
The
Farndale Directory. The genealogical material was originally structured by
Martin Farndale using the Farndale
Directory, a list of each individual in chronological order by date of
birth. This is still available and is an easier way to find individual members
of the historic family if you know when they were born.
Related
Families and Records
The Baker
Story. The website also tells the story of the Baker Families of
Highfields, and of Fenton Culvert and Hasfield
Court. This includes material about the Hall Family of
Staffordshire, the Bellyse
of Staffordshire and the Dods
of Highfields.
The Taylor
and Andrew families. You will find a genealogy of the Taylor and Andrew families, for
a taste of our smuggler ancestry.
The Lindsay
Family. You will find a genealogy of the Lindsay family of
Alnwick.
The Chapman
Family. There is also a simpler genealogical exploration of the Chapman Family
of Walter Chapman.
The Coutts
Family. You will find a genealogy of a maternal
line and paternal
line of the Coutts family.
The Gordon
Family. You will find a genealogy of the Gordons of Birkenburn.
The Scott
Family. You will find a genealogy of a branch of the Scott family.
The Burnett
family. You will find a genealogy of the Burnett family.
Regimental
Records. The material collected by Martin Farndale also provides a
unique history of First
Regiment Royal Horse Artillery 1950 to 1971 and the early years of the Royal
Military Academy Sandhurst.
The History
of the Website
This
website is the culmination of work started by Martin
Farndale in 1956 and continued by his son
Richard since 2000.
General
Sir Martin Farndale KCB died in May 2000.
During his lifetime, he carried out extensive research into the Farndale family
history. This website has been compiled by his son, Richard Farndale and
continues this research which is made available to anyone who may be
interested. The site was first published on 6 November 2001, and after a few
years off line, was re-published from March 2019.
After
nearly 75 years of work over two generations, the genealogy is aspiring to be a
uniquely thorough genealogy of a non-aristocratic British family, tracing the
family origins back to the Norman Conquest and beyond and comprising a historical
record of a single wider family. Work continues but the site already provides
significant depth and detail. What makes this record unique is the thorough
research by Martin and collation of a wide breadth of direct family records and
recollections, which can now be enhanced by twenty first century search
methods. The Farndales descend from the folk who made up the
engine room of British history. For the bulk of such families, it is generally very
difficult to go back in time much beyond the sixteenth century. However the
Farndales are privileged to have a locative name, which is rooted to a place.
What is more that place is a relatively small, rural valley in North Yorkshire,
which provides a uniqueness which helps research of early medieval records. The
name therefore provides a unique beacon which makes navigating the medieval
sources a possibility. This has made it possible to find significant records of
individuals back to the thirteenth century. The history of the place where we
know our ancestors made their home, enables us to take their story further back
in time to Scandinavian, Anglo-Saxon, and Roman times. We are extraordinarily
privileged to be able to see back that far.
Martin
Farndale s historical research began: 1956
Site First
Published by Richard Farndale (at www.farndale.info): 6 November 2001
Site Second
Published by Richard Farndale (at www.farndalefamily.co.uk): 6 December
2014
Site Third
Published by Richard Farndale (at www.farndalefamily.co.uk): 16 March 2019
Site Last
Updated: 28 September 2026
Website
Philosophy
Our
forebears tend to be fondly remembered for a generation or two and then
disappear from memory, except for slabs of stone that mark the place of their
burial. However each of our ancestors, and their close relatives were
individuals with their own rich stories. It is through their stories, and the
history of their lives, that their memories can be preserved within families
and communities of which they were once a part. Their stories also provide us
today with a direct route into our own past and our inheritance. Each
individual in the Farndale lines has their own separate webpage. Stories are
not told about living members of the families, who simply have a page as a
marker to find their way into their historic story. The stories of historic
ancestors are fully narrated, to preserve the rich lives each of them led. The
website is carefully researched from primary
and secondary sources with full referencing, to vouch the narrative and
provide a means for further research.
Contact Me
You can
contact me at rcfarndale@hotmail.com.
Please pass
on details of the site to Farndale relatives, those interested in Yorkshire history,
historians and genealogists. It is free to use and intended as a source of
material for all those who can benefit from it.
The best
way to view this site
I
suggest that you read the Farndale Story on a PC or tablet. If you can read the
story on a larger screen, that will be the best approach. An iPhone will work,
but the text may not always align properly.
The
more detailed research pages are primarily intended for use on a PC. This is because
the site is intended for the provision of detailed information, more suited to
the larger format of a PC. However, it does work quite well on a tablet, such
as an iPad. On an iPhone it may sometimes tend to be distorted with text not
always aligning, though otherwise it still works ok.
Personal
Information
I do not
wish to record detailed information about living Farndales unless I know that
you are happy for me to do so. This site is about historic Farndales who are no
longer alive. As a rule, I only record the most basic publicly available
information about living Farndales, primarily their year of birth. This is so
that anyone who wishes, can find themselves in the directory or in family
trees, and then use this site to explore their ancestry.
Where I am
aware of public information about living Farndales, on their own websites, or
public entries on the web which is available already, I have sometimes included
that information on personal pages of living Farndales.
If you find
your own entry on this website and would like me to include more information
about your part of the family, please let me know. Please don t provide me with
any information you would not wish to be publicly available.
I think it is very unlikely that I have recorded any information on the site
which people would prefer to keep private, but if there is any information on
this site which you would prefer not to appear, please email me at rcfarndale@hotmail.com, and I will remove it.
About the
Author
Richard
Farndale BA (Hons), LLB (Dist), LLM (Dist), FRGS is a former artillery officer and lawyer. He
was Chairman of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators in Scotland and
practiced dispute resolution in the Scottish courts and arbitral tribunals. He
is a member of the Royal Historical Society, the Yorkshire Archaeological and
Historical Society, the Cleveland & Teeside Local
History Society and the Helmsley Archaeological and Historical Society. In
retirement he is a passionate amateur historian and genealogist who applies his
professional understanding of the legal rules of evidence to the exploration of
his own family story, and Yorkshire’s history, with an interest in the Baker
family of Cheshire as well. Richard’s father, the late General Sir Martin
Farndale KCB, started to research the history of the Farndale family in the 1950s
and Richard has continued that research since Martin died in 2000. The work is
a two-generation endeavour.
Published
articles by the Author
Farndale,
Ricard, (2024), Farndale and its Medieval Beginnings in Medieval
Yorkshire, the journal of the Medieval Section of the Yorkshire
Archaeological and Historical Society, Issue 11, 2024. See pages
25 to 47 and pages
48 to 69.
Farndale,
Richard, (2026), England’s 1100th: Deira and the Idea of Anglo-Saxon
Unification in Yorkshire Archaeological Journal, 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1080/00844276.2026.2692264.
Richard is
currently working on a two-part series on the history of Kilton, North
Yorkshire, home to the Farndales for 250 years, for Cleveland History.
Peering back into our deep
history
The village in fact was like a deep-running cave
still linked to its antic past, a cave whose shadows were cluttered by spirits
and by laws still vaguely ancestral. This cave that we inhabited looked
backwards through chambers that led to our ghostly beginnings; and had not, as
yet, been tidied up, or scrubbed clean by electric light, or suburbanised by a
Victorian church, or papered by cinema screens.
It was something we just had time to inherit, to
inherit and dimly know – the blood and beliefs of generations who had been in
this valley since the Stone Age.
That continuous contact has at last been broken, the
deeper caves sealed off for ever. But arriving, as I did, at the end of that age,
I caught whiffs of something old as the glaciers. There were ghosts in the
stones, in the trees, and the walls, and each field and hill had several.
The elder people knew about these things and would
refer to them in personal terms, and there were certain landmarks about the
valley – tree-clumps, corners in woods – that bore separate, antique,
half-muttered names that were certainly older than Christian. When I sat at
home among my talking sisters, or with an old woman sucking her jaws, and heard
the long details, I would look through the windows and see the wet walls
streaming, the black trees bend in the wind, and I saw these things happening
as natural convulsions of our landscape, and though dry-mouthed, I was never
astonished.
(Lee, Laurie (1959), Cider with
Rosie, Chapter 6, pages
104 to 105).
The past is a foreign country, they do things
different there.
(Hartley, L P (1954), The Go-Between,
Prologue, page 1).