• The starting point was a tree compiled by A L Surl in the early 1980’s which I then circulated within the family during 1984 for updating. Aunt Wyn Taylor was a great help with some corrections but as contact had been lost with virtually all other Sage descendents, progress has been slow, certainly with 20th century descendents. 

• Early Hertfordshire census data is not available for free on the Internet and Hertfordshire CC does not have a comparable BM&D index to Camdex in Cambridgeshire but Free BM&D has been a very useful resource, particularly for births and marriages

• Thanks to Richard Smith of Watford, a distant 3rd cousin, for finding this site and providing much valuable information, including copy birth certificates which have cleared up several mysteries and confirmed other suppositions as well as all the info for generations 4-6. 

2 - General Notes & Abbreviations

• Those born with the Sage surname are shown in bold face. Paragraph numbers are the generation reference numbers from the family trees followed by sub-paragraphs in chronological sequence of birth. For simplicity, the same generation reference numbers have been used across all the family trees - generation 11 being my own. 

• Abbreviations ‘b’, ‘m’, ‘d’ and ‘bap’ have been used for birth, marriage, death and baptism. 'c' denotes circa while > and < have been used to denote after or before the quoted date as a reference to them at that time has been located. 

• Early parish registers (at least pre-1837) were compiled on a ‘church year’ basis which if I recall correctly was from the ‘Quarter Day’ in March to that in March the following year (so not dissimilar in principle to our current tax year). Events in Jan-March thus appear in the registers under the heading of the previous year so it is very easy when transcribing register entries to record the wrong year. Some transcriptions quote both possible years eg 1750/1 but where the latter is the more likely due to other related events (eg would mean two children born within less than 9 nine months of one another), this has been changed and is denoted by an asterisk (*).

• Compulsory Birth, Marriage and Death registration commenced in 1837. To speed searching for a particular event, indexes were created for each type covering a quarter of a year, the March quarter covering events in Jan, Feb and Mar and so on. These Indexes show only very limited information but they were available for free access at Somerset House then St Catherine's House in London. Many, but by no means all, have since been transcribed into databases which can be viewed on the Internet. As such they are a valuable resource but

  • Actual date of the event is not given so info from this source is shown as 'Mar qtr' or 'Mar 1/4' denoting that the event took place in Jan, Feb or Mar of that year.

  • Until the early 20th century, marriage indexes did not show the name of the spouse. Where other information (eg census) has not been used to establish a Christian name, all that can be deduced is that it was someone on the same page of the original register. Normally this gives a choice of two (but it can be more) hence showing these as 'xxx or yyy'.

   

3 - Topography

• From the earliest references traced until at least the 1880's, all the events took place in a small area of West Hertfordshire ....

  

  Map showing proximity of Leverstock Green to Hemel, St Albans and Redbourn(e)

   

  One complication though is that parish and local authority boundaries have apparently changed a few times over the years, particularly around Leverstock Green so that at times it appears as itself and on others as part of Hemel Hempstead or St Albans. Local historian Barbara Chapman writes "to live in Leversrtock Green CAN still mean that the person in question lived in St Albans, St. Michaels.  Similarly the same person may quote St. Michaels ( the parish) as being the place where they were born  in one census, and Leverstock Green in another.  Both are accurate.  The trouble with LG is that until 1850 there was no parish of Leverstock Green as such - the village was divided between 3 parishes: Hemel Hempstead, St. Michaels (St Albans) and Abbots Langley. Even today, although the boundaries have been redrawn, there are still residents of Leverstock Green (mostly down Westwick Row) who are in St. Michaels ward (St. Albans), some in Nash Mills (Dacorum) and others in Leverstock Green (Hemel) while many who in earlier centuries would have considered being part of LG are now in Three Rivers Borough (Abbots Langley)."

  Barbara's map below shows the current situation .....

   

  

For more information on Leverstock Green and its history, see Barbara's website www.lgchronicle.net 

• Many of the females in the family are shown in censuses as a "Straw Plaiter". This occupation  is related to the local straw hat making industry and more on this fascinating subject - and its social implications - can be found on Hertfordshire Genealogy's excellent website at http://www.hertfordshire-genealogy.co.uk/data/occupations/straw-plait.htm

• As with most families, the railways allowed greater mobility of labour in the second half of the 19th century so one sees the gradual dispersal of the family over a much wider area. 

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Any Copyright or other Intellectual Rights applicable to information sources is hereby acknowledged.

All original material is © 2005-2007 copyright Malcolm Surl but, with permission, may freely be copied.

 mgs 5th May 2007