There are quite a lot of entries in the Hunsdon Parish Registers to the Redington family. Spellings of the surname vary (quite substantially) but we have uncovered the following information about this family.
Our earliest record predates the registers. It appears that a John Redington left 20d in his will to the High Altar of Hunsdon Church in or around the 1530s.[1] In terms of value, we are probably looking at the equivalent of several days’ wages for a labourer.
Legacies of this magnitude and kind were quite conventional at the time, being made in lieu of tithes forgotten. Wills were often made when a person was dying, and mindful of the Roman Catholic teaching about Purgatory, it was common for people to do what they could to settle any outstanding obligations in their will. Such gifts were usually intended to pay for candles to burn before the High Altar.
This gift is of particular interest because it appears that around this time – when Henry VIII was breaking with Rome – gifts to churches started to become less frequent. It is suggested that Hunsdon was a community which began adopting Protestant ideas early and quickly. So why did John Redington leave this particular legacy when many of his contemporaries did not?
We don’t know. He may have been a devout Catholic, or he may have just following the dying conventions of the day. What we do know is that a century or so later, Hunsdon’s Redingtons ended up travelling to the New World.
We were first alerted to this by looking at the registers. There are lots of Redingtons listed in the earliest registers, then the name just vanishes. In the middle of the 17th century, just when many Puritan families were departing for a land of liberty, the Redington name stops appearing in the registers.
We’ve tried to reconstruct Thomas Redington’s family tree from the records we have and from other online information. Here’s what we have concluded. (Solid lines are confirmed. Dashed lines are likely. Dotted lines are possible.)
At some point between 1631 and 1634, Thomas moved with his family to High Laver in Essex. His wife, Hannah, died and he remarried. It is known from Fiske’s genealogical studies that his sons, Abraham (Reddyngton) and John (Reddington), travelled to Massachusetts and made new lives for themselves there, with families of their own.
Anyone who can trace their family tree back that far can be assured that their ancestor Thomas was baptised in Hunsdon Church. The first Thomas Reddington in this family tree (married to Johan Burnoppe) was a witness to a will made in 1585 by John Eliot, uncle of Bennet Eliot (father of John Eliot, “Apostle to the Indians”).
[1] Hunsdon and Widford, p16