Brentnall.Com
The Homepage for the Brentnall Family
(and those related thereto)
Date of last update: March 15, 2012
This Web Page is an effort to bring together all those people who are related to the family "Brentnall."
Welcome to the web site for the Brentnall family - Brentnall.Com. This website is intended to act as a source of genealogical information for those families related to or through the Brentnall family.
When I first started this project I was aware of very few families hosting the "Brentnall" surname or those related to that surname. I assumed that since there appeared to be so few Brentnalls in the world that it would seem to follow logically that we must all be related. In the roughly sixteen years existence of this project I have discovered that there are not just a "few" related families - there are many.
Since I started this project in the mid-1990's, quite a number of people have shared genealogical information with people on our mailing list. In the majority of instances where people have provided genealogical information we have been able to find the common link.
I have created a page that shows some of my ancestors on my side of the Brentnall family. I use a program called "Family Tree Maker" to keep track of what information I have. My ancestry page was created from the output of that program. To see the page click here. Can you relate any of your information to mine?
Note: Information is updated periodically based on information received. So check often.
Fortunately, others who are related have provided their information for sharing. They are listed below:
Gloria Brentnall, a
resident of the U.K., sent some family information from her family
tree. She advises that the information was actually provided by
her sister-in-law, Rosalie Brentnall, who has dilgently collected it
all over the years and put in all the hard work. I cannot yet correlate
her information to any information in my family tree. I look forward
to the day we find the missing link. Perhaps it would help you.
To see her family tree information click here.
Alison Parkin (nee Brentnall)
sent a number of things to help the genealogical research project:
Family Tree for the Brentnall ancestors of D J Wright and Joan Smedley
Family Tree for Alison's Ancestors back to William Brentnall - b. ca. 1702
Alison provided the following extracts relative to the descendants of Robert Brentnall (m. Sarah Roe, 1608)
Generations 3 (continued), 4 and 5
Alison also provided the following documents which appear to be a listing of all Brentnall burials and baptisms from 1586 to 1790 showing the child's name and the father's name:
In mid-September, 2004, Alison went to Middlesbrough, U.K. and took
photos of the signs of 'Brentnall Street', the
'Brentnall Business Units' and the 'Brentnall Centre'. She also
provided some background information about Thomas Brentnall, 9th Mayor of Middlesbrough, England. Click here to read it.
Mick Hamer sent an e-mail on
October 25, 2004, which read as follows:
"I'm enclosing some information relating to the Brentnalls of Ilkestone, Derbyshire. Some of your website visitors may find an ancestor here. These extracts were compiled by Ernald James Brentnall, who was born in 1875. He was a great-nephew of Thomas Brentnall, the Mayor of Middlesbrough. Ernald compiled a family history. I have some of this history (or maybe all of it). But it is handwritten and difficult to decipher, so I don't think it will be too helpful. I'll send you more details when I get time to put it into an easier format."
Here is the information Mick sent: Reference 1, Reference
2, Reference 3
Subsequently, after some persuasion by several users of this web site,
Mick provided a copy of the family history compiled by Ernald. He
prefaces the history as follows::
"This history was written by Ernald Brentnall in about 1938 or 1939 and was addressed to Sarah Jane Cartwright (née Brentnall). It is six pages of handwritten foolscap—which means most pages are too long to be scanned in one pass. [Because the pages are foolscap, you have to read page 1 and then pick up the end of the page on 1a, before going onto page 2. I can't vouch for the family crest.]? Here is the family history by page: 1, 1a, 2, 2a, 3, 3a, 4, 4a, 5, 5a, 6 and 7
(Sarah) Jane (1876-1964) was the eldest child of Thomas Louis Brentnall, who was the second son of Henry Brentnall, who appears in the table of children on the first page. The John who is mentioned as the other grandson of Henry, may have been Jane’s younger brother, John Brentnall. But there may easily be another cousin.
The Uncle Alfred on page 5 is Alfred Stevens Brentnall (1860-1937) Thomas Louis’s younger brother. This helps to date the history. He mentions Thomas Brentnall (1846-1937) of Melbourne—the author of the book My Memories—and the son of Joseph Edmund Brentnall. Ernald knew about the deaths of both Alfred and Thomas in 1937 but not about the death of Stanley, Thomas’s eldest son. Stanley died in Australia in 1939.
I don’t know a lot more about Ernald. He says he was a teacher and that he got an honour—the MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire) in 1935. I have the names of six children, Lily, Emma, Ethel, George, Ernald and John—some of whom are pretty certain to be living. He was still in touch with Jane (my great-aunt) in 1950 when he sent her the typewritten extracts from the History of Ilkestone (the normal spelling today is Ilkeston)."
Susan Harlap (whose mother was
a Brentnall) provided considerable information in a November 2004 e-mail.
She states,
"My understanding is that there are two branches to the family, and that Brentnalls are not at all rare. My own branch lived in Cheshire, UK, in the 1500s to early 1900s; the other branch is from Derbyshire. We have a large family tree going back to 1515. Some time around WW1, one distant cousin migrated to the US, to Alabama, or near there.
Our branch of Brentnalls was most concentrated to the south east of Manchester, in the general area of Glossop. The family tree goes back to 1515, and originally identifies people as tenants of Lord Davenport at Bramhall and yeomen (house owners) in that area. Bramhall is now a suburb in the south to south-east of Manchester. The first marriage recorded on our tree names the wife as "of Bramhall". The mayor of Salford, mentioned in your other email, is my distant cousin.
The "Brent Knoll" story is mentioned in our records, but the family tree makes no obvious connection to Somerset. I would have thought that some useful information might come from Y-chromosome studies. At least one person has suggested that the name might have been transliterated from ladino, if the original ancestor was a refugee from Spain or Portugal.
My own ancestors married into the Bower, Radcliffe and Cresswell families. Later they became methodists (Wesleyans)."
With respect to her family tree she advises that it is, "... on six large sheets of paper. The tree was constructed in 1929 to work out who was entitled to inherit a portion of a tract of land that was being sold in Salford. There were hundreds of descendents."
Susan also sent a document containing "transcripts of old records (I don't know where they came from) and J B Brentnall's comments on the tree for the Cheshire Brentnalls." It is available by clicking here.
And she also sent a photograph of a painting showing John Cresswell Brentnall (born 1816). Click here to see it.
Jeanette Brentnall: Jeanette has some documents that she copied of the Internet "several computers ago." In the interim she has lost the original images. The copies she has now have lost resolution and are difficult, if not impossible, to read. She asks that you look at the documents and if you recognize them and/or can provide a legible copy, let me know. Click here to see the documents.
Brentnall History in Derby: I came across an interesting footnote in a genealogical book about
the "Horseley family of Melbourne and Derby from 1760." The book
was written by Richard Horsley Osborne in 1995. Apparently one of
their family members, George Horsley, married a Sarah Brentnall, which
resulted in a somewhat lenthly footnote in the book. They were married
in Melbourne at the Melbourne "General Baptist" Chapel on June 15, 1845.
Sarah was the daughter of George Brentnall, blacksmith, deceased. Sarah's place of birth was shown as Nottingham (town) in the 1851 and subsequent censuses. Her father is said to have been a "whitesmith" rather than a "blacksmith." Sarah's father, George, was a "nailer". He had married Martha Eaton at Horsley, Derbyshire, in November, 1810.
To read the entire footnote from the book, click here.
If you have geneological information that you want to share, please forward it so I can consider posting it too.
This project will develop over time.
Meanwhile, send me e-mail if you have ideas or want to share information.
Mailing list: I was requested to devise a way that those interested in Brentnall genealogy could communicate easily with one another. Towards this end I established a Brentnall mailing list. If you want to be on the list send me an e-mail and let me know.
Gerald ("Gerry") Brentnall
(near Sacramento, California)
