Sidney Alfred Parsons and his Ancestors

The Newlyn Families of Tichborne and Cheriton

John Newlyn, who was born some time around the year 1718 in Tichborne in Hampshire, was a grandfather of Faith Newlyn who became the wife of John Boyes of Owslebury. And their son William Boyes was a grandfather of Sidney Parsons who was a grandfather of the present author. John Newlyn was therefore a three-times great-grandfather of Sidney’s.


The village of Tichborne is about four miles east of the city of Winchester in the county of Hampshire in central southern England.

The parish which surrounds the village is long and relatively narrow extending from Alresford in the north east to Morestead and Owslebury in the south west. The upper part of the River Itchen flows northwards along the east of the parish from its source to New Alresford where it joins the stream now known as the Arle and turns westwards towards Winchester. The extreme south of the parish was thickly wooded country in the midst of which stood Honeyman Farm and Longwood Farm both of which were, at times, homes of members of the Newlyn family.

The branch of the River Itchen between its source and New Alresford now bears the name of the main stream but it was not always so. Several Anglo Saxon charters which describe the area gave the name Icenan (The Itchen) to the stream now known as the Arle and the name Ticce burnan to the stream (or burn) which joined it from the south. The name might mean ‘The Kid Stream’ or, alternatively, the parish and the stream might both have been named after a man called ‘Ticce’ or ‘Ticca’.

The parish of Cheriton, which adjoins Tichborne to its east, was originally a part of Tichborne and was sometimes informally treated as such as late as the 17th century.


The earliest records of Newlyns in this area date from the late 16th century during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. We know, for example, that a Richard Newland married Elizabeth Hobbs in 1577 and a Peter Newland married Anne Androus in 1586, both in Cheriton. We also know that there was a John Newlin whose son Richard was baptised in nearby Hinton Ampner in 1574 and whose widow Joan was buried in Cheriton in 1597. Note that the surnames Newland, Newlin and Newlyn were used interchangeably and wills sometimes included notes to that effect.

The records are fragmentary and we can not yet say with confidence who the parents of our John Newlyn were. But it does seem almost certain that the Newlyn families in Tichborne and Cheriton in the early 18th century were all closely related to each other and descended from a Peter Newland who was probably born just after the middle of the 16th century and either his first wife Ann or his second wife Susan.

Peter Newland, who married Ann Androus in 1586, had three children with her that we know of. They were called Richard, Ann and John, but they all died at birth or very soon after. Peter’s wife Ann died in 1593 and he married again. He had three daughters with Susan, his second wife, and two sons, called John and William. Peter died in 1599. His widow Susan was obviously a very capable woman because she became a reeve for the Manor of Cheriton, a post which she must have taken over from her husband when he died. A reeve’s role at that time was to supervise the manor’s tenants and labourers in order to ensure that they worked the farms efficiently and productively. Susan lived at Tershawe Deane which is in the south of Tichborne parish near to Honeyman Farm and Longwood Farm. That part of the parish is close to the village of Morestead where their descendant John Newlyn’s wife Mary Complyn would be born many years later. Suasn Newlyn died in 1622 leaving a will in which she made bequests to her two sons.

When Susan Newlyn made her will her son William was living just south of Winchester in a village called Compton, but after her death he took over from her as a reeve for Cheriton Manor and he retained that role for almost fifty years until his death in 1671. His son Peter (baptised 1613) lived at Tershawe Deane and another of his sons, John, at Honeyman’s Farm both of which lie at some distance from the village of Tichborne.

The John Newlyn in whom we are interested, who was born around the year 1718, and who married Mary Complyn in Easton in 1745, seems to have been descended from one of those two of William Newlyn’s sons but it is difficult to disentangle the family relationships because there were two other John Newlyns born in that area at about the same time.



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You are free to make use of the information in these web pages in any way that you wish but please be aware that the author, Mike Parsons, is unable to accept respsonsibility for any errors or omissions.

Mike can be contacted at parsonspublic@gmail.com

The information in these web pages comes from a number of sources including: Hampshire County Records Office, Somerset Heritage Centre; Dorset County Records Office; Southampton City Archives; the General Register Office; several on-line newspaper archives; several on-line transcriptions of Parish Register Entries; and several on-line indexes of births, marriages and deaths. The research has also been guided at times by the published work of others, both on-line and in the form of printed books, and by information from personal correspondence with other researchers, for all of which thanks are given. However, all of the information in these web pages has been independently verified by the author from original sources, facimile copies, or, in the case of a few parish register entries, transcriptions published by on-line genealogy sites. The author is aware that some other researchers have in some cases drawn different conclusions and have published information which is at variance from that shown in these web pages.