ORIGINS OF THE DIBBLE FAMILY IN ENGLAND

[transcript of letter sent to VanBuren Lamb, Jr. by

Ceilia & John Dibblee

Warwickshire

United Kingdom]

 

POSITIVE EVIDENCE   Robert Dibble [Deeble] lived at Glastonbury, Somerset, at least between 1605 and February 1610, when his son John 1605, and daughters Joanna (April 1609) and Francis (February 1610) were baptized at the church of St. John Baptist.  It is likely that he moved shortly after the last event because there is no record of his son Thomas’ baptism anywhere, and Thomas (calculating from his age at emigration) must have been born in 1612 or 1613.  The fact that we have the right family is proved because Francis’ age at emigration tallies with her baptismal date.  The probability is that Thomas was baptized elsewhere after the family moved, but the record has not survived.  It would have been likely to have survived at Glastonbury, where the records were carefully kept, unless his father, perhaps for religious reasons, avoided having him baptized.  Most parents started their families shortly after marriage but as neither Robert’s marriage nor the baptism of earlier children is recorded at Glastonbury, it is fair guess he moved there shortly before 1605.

 

There is no evidence of the family elsewhere in England before or after this until, Robert, probably with some of his family, emigrated from Weymouth, Dorset, to New England in the “Recovery of London” (Master, Gabriel Cornish) on 31st, March 1633 to be followed by Thomas and Francis from the same port on 20th March 1635.

 

BACKGROUND                 The county of Somerset was highly populated in the 16th/17th centuries.  There were a number of families with the name ”Dibble”, or of a similar spelling, well distributed over it and in neighboring Devon and the east of Cornwall as well.  The name “Robert” and “Thomas” were common among them.  Spelling was quite arbitrary, and surnames were apt to be written down as what the writer thought he heard, the owner of the name being either indifferent to it or illiterate.  In this case anything containing a “D”, a “b” and an “l” could be what we were looking for, but there is no reason to suppose that any groups or similar name were necessarily related.

 

Unless an individual was a prominent person or a criminal, the only mark he was likely to leave for posterity was the (supposedly compulsory) record of his baptism, marriage and burial kept in a register by the incumbent of the local parish church, or his clerk.  Some only of these records survive.  In Somerset there are a very large number of parishes, about half of which have registers starting in later than the dates we are interested in or have gaps.  It was an age of successive outbreaks of plague, to be followed in a short time by civil war, iconoclasm and sackings of clergy, and records suffered.  It is very rare indeed to be able to follow any individual through Baptism, Marriage and Burial in the registers, and impossible to be sure that, say, a baptism, followed by a marriage of someone of the same name about 20 years later, refers to the same person.

 

So we don’t know who were the parents of our Robert Dibble, where he was born or married or if he had fathered any children before John.  After searching through most of the likely parishes in Somerset, Devon and Cornwall (Dorset seems void of Dibbles) we haven’t found a really likely candidate who might be Robert Dibble. 

 

As there were plenty of Dibbles around in the West Country (and still are) one can presume the stock had been there fro some time and were much more likely to have been descended from Saxons than from French immigrants (as some have supposed).

 

References:  Parish Register, Glastonbury St. John Baptist – Nat. Gen. Soc. Quarterly v. 71. #3 “Genealogical Gleanings in England” – Original shipping Lists 1600-1700 by J.C. Hotten.