See the surname distribution diagram for 1801 and 1972 below.
PROVING THE TITTERTON FAMILY ORIGIN - GENEALOGICAL PROOF.
If you examine details of a family in a particular village with all records available then one can usually see a family passing through three stages:
1. the arrival of the 'founder' , then his children and grandchildren where the genealogy is easy to connect them altogether.
2. the presence of several families together with fathers of the same christian names where it is not so easy to draw up the family tree with certainty.
3. The presence of perhaps one or two disconnected families that disappear. (The disappearance could because by the family dying out of by individuals moving away).
The Titterton families on the various Titterton (UK) Families page can be seen to demonstrate one, two or even three of these stages. It is reasonable to assume that the founder of a family at a new location must been someone who moved away from a family which was established earlier elsewhere.
The four earliest family groupings are based in the North Staffordshire villages of Alstonfield, Cauldon and Grindon and the nearby Derbyshire town of Ashbourne.
Members of the early Ashbourne family descend from a Thomas Titterton who died in 1600, who one assumes originally came from elsewhere. During the next 100 years we can see the family develop from stage 1 to stage 3.
The earliest surviving records for Cauldon are wills starting about 1530. These references show only one family there. From the limited Cauldon data it appears that the family passed from stage 1 to stage 3 in perhaps 100 years without really reaching stage 2.
The Grindon family goes back to a George Titterton living in 1589, although it takes 100 years before there are two established Titterton families living side by side in the village. Perhaps there was a succession of only sons or perhaps younger ones found pastures new. Fortunately the reference to George in 1589 shows that he is the son of a member of the Cauldon family. So Grindon is a branch of Cauldon. The family passes through stages 2 and 3 with the last member of the family leaving Grindon in the 1860s.
Alstonfield parish registers and wills make it clear that there were several families living there at an early date. There were at least 6 separate families having children in the 1540s and 1550s.. Narrowdale is clearly in Stage 2 at this time. This ties in with the earliest reference of 1398 (see the Titterton surname page). Thus Alstonfield appears to be the genealogical origin of the family.
NB The pull of London was such that there are Tittertons living there before 1600.
PROVING THE TITTERTON FAMILY ORIGIN - STATISTICAL PROOF
Statistical analysis of the data has been made using the median area theory. This theory tries to place the data about a family into a mathematical frame work. If a surname has a point origin then over the generations members are going to move away from the origin and set up their own family centres. The spread of the surname will expand with time. If one assumes that there are no social or geographical barriers to prevent or encourage the distribution in any direction from the point source then analysing the data at a particular point in time, the point source can be calculated.
The distribution is plotted on a map and a circle is drawn
which encompasses half the distribution within it and half
outside it. The position is this circle is adjusted so that the
ratio of half and half is maintained while reducing the radius
to a minimum value. The theoretical point origin of the
Titterton family is the centre of the circle with the smallest
radius.
The results for the BT telephone subscribers in the 1972/3 telephone directories are shown in the map by the blue circle. In 1973 half the Tittertons in the UK with telephones lived inside this circle. They were all within 32 miles of Parwich, a Derbyshire village 4 miles from Alstonfield. The analysis was repeated for the data in the 1988 IGI microfiche which had an average date of 1801. This is shown by the green circle. This centre is Ellastone, Staffs, 9 miles from Alstonfield. This circle is smaller because the Tittertons had not spread out as far in 1801 as they had by 1972.
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