I have never lived in Husthwaite but my mother was born in the village and when I was very young she and I would sometimes get a coach from York and it would drop us outside Acaster Hill Farm where her cousin, Cynthia Wentworth nee Slater lived. My mother, Winifred Long, born in a house then called Hazeldene with large topiary forms of birds in the front garden. This was the family home of one of the Slater family. Her mother was Muriel Slater and her father was Leslie Long, the third generation of a family of blacksmiths living in the Nookin, at the house which was to become the village post office. Leslie’s father was Christopher, with a Christian name held by quite a lot of previous ancestors, and his father was John, the first of the three to become a blacksmith and all three to live in Husthwaite.
Some of their family history I have published on the website of Husthwaite Local History Society. At the time of writing that article I had no idea of how the fortunes of the Long family would be altered. It seemed likely that the family had been using the name Christopher for a number of generations. There were of course a number of other children and Robert and Thomas were names commonly chosen for the boys but for my branch it seemed to be that in every one of four generations there was a Chris. The family had been resident at Burnt Yates near Ripley (between Ripon and Harrogate) in a house called Winsley Hall, now a farm, since the 16th Century and were quite wealthy, often buying an extra farm when there was a generation with too many boys. Another branch of the Longs bought a brewery and later successfully transferred the business to London.
Some time back I found a very distant cousin and close to two hundred years ago we found his Long ancestor and mine had been brothers. He had taken a dna test and found another family who also went back to Yorkshire but had ancestors at Yeadon near Guisley. With a dna connection one can find relatives that are not easily found by any other method as long as you are both connected to the same family history site. You then simply have to find matches that are in both family trees.
From other evidence, mostly through the free FamilySearch site, it seemed almost certain that both families originated in Trowbridge in Wiltshire in the sixteenth Century. Where one probably continued in sheep farming, the other manufactured wool into broadloom, a Wiltshire speciality. It seems earlier generations did both with one to supply the other. It appears too that the Wiltshire Longs of Tudor times had royal connections. Through two marriages we had a connection with Jane Seymour, third wife of Henry VIII, and her family home of Wolf Hall in Wiltshire. Making a connection, however, is beginning to hit a “brick wall” and to come down to earth with my other Yorkshire side I need to look their story of relations who were Irish gypsies and I might just have found who one of them was.
Ray King April 2023