My Father's Ancestors and Relations


My father was Charles Mordaunt Barnard (1901-1983), and this page is a guide to the material on the website about his ancestors and relations. The pages linked from here include family trees (pedigrees) and pages discussing the relevant family history (including biographical notes on family members). I plan to add links to the relevant source document catalogues.

The family trees can be viewed either in SVG format (which can be scrolled up, down, left and right in a normal web browser) or as PDF files, which can be downloaded and printed. Family trees showing living people are protected by a password, and are intended only for my cousins shown on them - please contact me for the relevant access details.

John Barnard
Updated 1 November 2023

Barnard, Drake, Rosenhagen, Martin, Mordaunt and Elwes

My direct male-line ancestors were Cambridge-educated clergymen (my grandfather was the last of five consecutive generations of Barnards to be in Holy Orders) who can be traced back to 17th-century Leeds. In successive generations they married into the Drake family (another Cambridge-educated Yorkshire family which included several clergymen), the Rosenhagen family (who came to England from Germany as part of the retinue of one of King George I's mistresses) and the Martin family (who were landed gentry in East Anglia, with a connection to the Mordaunt Earls of Peterborough, prominent political figures at the time of the Civil War and afterwards). Many names from these connections have been perpetuated through subsequent generations, including my own middle name of Mordaunt.

My great-grandmother was also a Barnard, being my great-grandfather's first cousin one removed, which thus gives me two lines of descent from this family. Her branch had multiple connections to the Elwes family (not only by marriage, but also because, as patrons of the relevant parishes, they were able to appoint their clerical Barnard relatives to the Rectories and Vicarages they controlled). In addition, cousins on her branch married twice into the Henslow - Hooker - Thiselton-Dyer dynasty of prominent botanists, which provided three successive Directors of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew.

The following family tree shows the various connections between these families:

Some biographical information on my direct ancestors, and their collateral branches, is given on the following page, though this remains a "work in progress":
My first cousins on my father's side, descendants of my paternal grandfather, are shown on the following tree:
My great-grandfather, Rev. Mordaunt Barnard (1795-1885), married twice, giving my grandfather four much older half-sisters and a half-brother. Two of the half-sisters married brothers from the Neville-Rolfe family, while the other two successively married the same man, Lieut. Edward Thomas Dundas of Manour (1827-1920). The first couple of generations of their descendants are shown on the main Barnard pedigree, while more recent ones, who are half-second-cousins to me, are shown on the following tree:

Taunton

My father's mother was a Taunton. Though her father, Rev. Frederick Taunton (1815-1904), was a graduate of St John's College Cambridge, her family was more closely associated with both the city and University of Oxford. They can be traced back to the West Country, and the name is ultimately derived from the town in Devon. The following family tree shows them from the 17th to 20th centuries:

My first cousins, the descendants of my paternal grandmother, are shown on the following tree:

Wild, Tucker, Heard and Lefebvre

Rev. Frederick Taunton's second wife Flora Charlotte Wild (1843-1924), my great-grandmother, had an ancestry which included the Bermuda-based colonial Tucker family, the Lefebvre family originally from France and the sister of Sir Isaac Heard (1730-1822) the senior officer of the College of Arms. Heard was the subject of a satirical epitaph by the Irish poet Thomas Moore (1779-1852); by co-incidence, Moore also wrote a set of Odes to Nea expressing his unrequited love for Hester Louisa Tucker (1782-1817), whose daughter Mary eventually married Heard's great-nephew Commissary-General Henry James Wild (1793-1873), and they became Flora's parents. Two generations later Moore's nickname for Hester Tucker (literally meaning "new" or "fresh" and taken by Moore from a line in Euripdes' Medea) was resurrected for my aunt Nea Everilda Barnard (1905-1986).

I am still researching this branch of my ancestry, and will add material to the website in due course.