Dummer families seem to have originated independently in two areas of the world: in England and in Germany. It is extremely unlikely that there was ever a link between the two. This web site is concerned with the Dummer families whose origins lie in England. Today those families have spread beyond the shores of the United Kingdom and members are to be found in North America, Australia, New Zealand, mainland Europe, and elsewhere.

The earliest Dummers took their family name from the village of Dummer in north Hampshire. The name of the village is derived from Dun (meaning hill) and Mer (lake or pond). A hill there certainly is, in the shape of Dummer Down, but what form the water took is uncertain, for there is no lake or pond there today. It is likely that there was once a dew-pond on the down.

Dummer is a small village just off the busy M3 Motorway just where it is joined by the A30 trunk road. The village, with its thatched cottages and ancient church, has somehow managed to stay fairly unspoilt. The general air is that of a prosperous community. The church dates back to around 1200, not many years after William the Conqueror seized the English throne, and about the time that he decreed that a great survey be made of his new kingdom - the Domesday Survey. It is about this time too that we first come across the Dummer family.

Dummer church is lucky to have escaped rebuilding during the Victorian era and therefore retains many of the historic features from past centuries. The chancel and arch date from the late 12th century, as does the rood canopy. The gallery dates from the time of Charles ll.

Dummers were originally centred in three main areas: Hampshire, Wiltshire, and Sussex. We do not yet know if they were all from a commom origin. The adoption of DNA testing in family history in future will bring some very interesting resuts. By testing living people known to be from each of the groups it may be possible to find the links, although it should always be born in mind that Grannie may not have been telling the truth about the father of her son! Perhaps even testing of identified remains of the very earliest Dummers may be permitted. Time will tell.

The Dummers of Dummer form the earliest of the main groups. As was the custom, the principal landowner took the name of the village as an identity for himself and his family. These Lords of the Manor of Dummer flourished from the beginning of the 12th century until the last of the line died without living offspring at the end of the 16th century. His memorial can still be seen beside the altar of Dummer church. Through marriage, they also had a presence in Somerset for 200 years, bequeathing the family name to the villages of Pendomer and Chilthorne Domer.

The earliest peple bearing the name Dummer were from the village of that name, and they bore it in the form de Dummer (or de Dumer/Dommer/Domer), e.g. Geoffrey de Dummer- Geoffrey of or from Dummer - to distinguish themselves from other people of the same first name. In due course the use of "de" was dropped. Thus the Lords of the Manor of Dummer assumed the name of the village shortly after the Norman Conquest (1066) and their descendants continued to use the name for the next five and a half centuries until the line died out. Strictly speaking,during most of this time they were not Dummers at all, since in the early 1300s heiress Ellen Dummer was an only child and when she married Sir Nicholas Atmore he assumed her surname. Their children were Atmore alias Dummer, or vice versa. But we are chronicling a surname here, and are not restricted to the male lines.

Early on, one of the Dummers of Dummer went off and married Agnes from Penne in Somerset. The village of their abode there became known as Pendomer, and a nearby village became Chilthorne Domer. Pendomer these days is still a tiny hamlet at the end of a long lane, but in the church there the well-preserved stone figure of Sir John de Dommer, clad in chain mail with the Dummer arms shown on his breast and shield, lies on his tomb, where he has lain for over 700 years. The well-worn effigy of his father William is tucked away behind a chair in the chancel at Chilthorne Domer.

Before the Dummers of Dummer died out in 1593, other Dummers are recorded only a few miles from Dummer village, probably descended from a branch of the more ancient family.One of them, a female Dummer, married Richard Pyldren, and their descendants used the name Dummer in preference to their father's original name. These "Pyldren" Dummers truly prospered, some moving up the social scale from farmers to merchants, lawyers and Gentlemen. They came to amass huge holdings of land in Hampshire and, by virtue of their wealth, exerted considerable influence in the region. Some held Office of State and served as Members of Parliament. One of their number was a founding father of Massachusetts. Their descendants are to be found in North America, Australia and elsewhere. Overall, this was the most successful branch of the family, and certainly the best known.

Richard Pyldren married Matilda (or Maud) Dummer sometime before 1523. Richard was a freeholder at Overton, just 5 miles west of Dummer village, and 22 miles north of Southampton. Matilda was probably the heiress oof John Dummer, the local representative of the King at Overton. Richard variously used either Pyldren or Dummer as his surname, as did his children, but subsequent generations dropped the Pyldren name. The family initially lived at Owslebury, later at Durley. We know of five grandchildren of Richard and Matilda, of which Thomas was the one who continued the mainstream of the family. Thomas married Joane, held land at Bishopstoke and at Swaythling village in North Stoneham parish, dying before 1626, but it was four of his children (John, Richard, Thomas and Stephen) who were to make Dummer a name to be reckoned with.

John Dummer was probably the eldest son of Thomas and Joane. His descendants continued to increase the family wealth, notably at law. Edmund (born 1663) was appointed Clerk of the Great Wardrobe, one of those archaic positions at the Sovereign's court which were later abolished. His brother Thomas became Deputy Keeper of the Great Wardrobe. The son of the latter Thomas, Thomas Lee Dummer, was a colourful character. He bought Cranbury Park and Mansion near Winchester, and wanting something to adorn his new park, he purchased the Winchester City Cross from the City Fathers, but the good citizens of the town drove his workmen away, and he had to make do with a plaster replica which the rain washed away. But the lack of male heirs to the vast estates was to cause bitter strife between cousins, and as a result the estates passed out of the Dummer family.

Richard Dummer, also a son of Thomas and Joane, is believed to have made his fortune as a trader, operating out of the port of Southampton. He was a Puritan, which at times was contrary to the Established Church and the monarch. He emigrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, becoming a founding father there, setting up a stock company, acquiring estates, and establishing a milling business. His eldest son was slain by Indians. Another of his sons was the America's first American-born silversmith. His grandson William was Governor of Boston and instrumental in bringing to an end the Indian Wars. William was childless, and he bequeathed his estates to trustees for the establishment of what became in 1763 Dummer Academy, the first school of its kind in the Province.

A third son of Thommas and Joane was Thomas Dummer who inherited Chickenhall Farm or estate and passed it on to his son, also Thomas. The latter's son was one of the most notable members of the Dummer family. Edmund became the Surveyor of the Navy and was responsible for setting up Devonport Dockyard, and undertaking improvements at Portsmouth. His Survey of the South Coast is a valuable and well-known historic document. Edmund was later discharged from the post after some murky goings-on, whereupon he set up the pioneering Packet Boat service to the West Indies. Misfortune attended him again however and he died a bankrupt. Lack of heirs was again to result in the estates passing out of the family.

Stephen Dummer was another son of Thomas and Joane. He inherited Middle Street and Hole Farms in Bishopstoke. He married Alice Archer then, like his brother Richard, emigrated to New England, but returned to Bishopstoke a few years later. Middlestreet Farm seems to have passed out of the family, but Hole (later Foxhole) Farm remained until the mid-nineteenth century. Stephen's line was the one that survived in Great Britain, and it is from Stephen that today's "Pyldren" Dummers there are descended. When Stephen's g-g-g-grandson, also Stephen, died in 1849 Foxhole farm was sold and the money divided between his sons. The last of the Pylden Dummer estates had gone. The three sons went their separate ways, the eldest, Stephen, became a tea dealer whose wife and daughter set up a private school in London and whose son became a surgeon. The next son Samuel, emigrated to Australia with his children, where their descendants flourished. The youngest son, William Chamberlayne, stayed in the area as a postmaster, and was in charge of the little Independant Chapel that his father had been instrumental in founding. William Chamberlayne's descendants still live in the area.

One Pyldren Dummer who should be mentioned is Jane, daughter of Stephen and Alice Archer. She emigrated with her parents to New England and stayed there, marrying Henry Sewall. Their son Samuel Sewall was to become Chief Justice of the new nation.

One of the Pyldren Dummers appears in Shipley, Sussex, at the end of the 16th century. John Dummer married Mary Michell there and he and his son John lived at the farm that was to become known as Dummer's Farm. Their old barn still stood there until recently. Unlike the other Pyldren Dummers, they were Roman Catholics, which may account for the distance between them and their Puritan cousins. Dummer's Farm Barn

We can trace the Sussex Dummers back to the 1690s when John and Mary Dummer had their children baptised at the little curch in the village of Heyshott, just north of the South Downs. John and most of his descendants were agricultural labourers working the fields around the market town of Midhurst for two or more centuries, in contrast to the Pyldren Dummers with whom they later corresponded. The great influence in the area was the Cowdray Estate, the great mansion at Cowdray being the home of the Montagues. The latter kept the Roman Catholic faith alive during the difficult years of religious turmoil, and their workers followed suit. In spite of the hardship of their lives, the Sussex Dummers became the most prolific of the Dummer families. Their descendants have spread from Sussex throughout the country and beyond, including Australia and the USA.

James Dummer, born 1793, became a miller and pursued his trade at various mills around Midhurst. It seems that he was the first of the line to start tracing his ancestors. He corresponded with Stephen Dummer of Foxhole Farm at Bishopstoke with a view to trying to win back into the Dummer family some of the estates that they claimed had wrongly passed from the family. He studied the complicated wills of the Pyldren Dummers and produced a long and detailed paper to justify the claims, demonstrating a surprising level of education for somebody of the rural class. His brother William took a more practical course and proceeded to dig up the front lawn of the former Dummer mansion at Cranbury Park in an attempt to get himself arrested, so that he could prove his claim in a court of law - without success!

After James' death his son Charles carried on the campaign, with similar lack of success. Charles, a millwright, married Julie Isaline Susanne Marie Martin from Switzerland. The hopeless situation in agriculture in the mid-nineteenth century caused Charles to take his young wife and parents to Portsmouth where he worked as a shipwright in the Royal Dockyard. One of his sons became another Australian immigrant. When Charles died in 1917 all the family history papers went into storage for 50 years until they were passed to the present author in 1960. Forty-five years of further research has resulted in the present one-name study of the Dummer families.

Dummers first appear in the parish registers of St Cyriac's church, Lacock, Wiltshire, in 1559. It is evident that at the time there were already several members of the family there. How far back they went, and where they came from we don't know. During the succeeding centuries their name crops up regularly as children are born, young people are wed and remains are buried. It is no surprise to find that some were weavers for this part of Wiltshire was noted for sheep and wool. The village is dominated by the manor house, Lacock Abbey, a former nunnery and the home of the Talbot family. William Fox-Talbot etched the building into the archives of photographic history - his image of an oriel window there is the oldest negative in existance. What makes Lacock so interesting is that it has hardly changed over the centuries and many of the buildings there would have been familiar to earlier Dummers. The old barn is now the Fox-Talbot Museum. The Talbot family was almost certainly the reason why there have been Dummer families in Wales since the end of the eighteenth century.

The packhorse bridge down the lane by the church was once known as "Dummer's Bridge". But Lacock has a place in modern history too, for Geoffrey Dummer was one of the Lacock Dummers. He pioneered the technology of printed / etched electronic circuits and proposed the idea of integrated circuits ("chips"). Today he is internationally recognised as "The Prophet of the Integrated Circuit"

Today there are no Dummers at Lacock; the last member, an old lady up Bowden Hill, died in the early 1960s.

John Dummer appears at Margam, near Port Talbot in Wales in 1801. He was almost certainly a Lacock Dummer. The Talbot family of Lacock had been instrumental in opening up the coal mines in the region, and to support the industry it had created the port which bears its name. They would naturally try to recruit labour from the rural workers on their estates in Wiltshire, although John Dummer himself did not become a miner. Most of his descendants did work in the mines however, or in the steelworks or tinplate works. Hard work, dirty work, and most of all, dangerous work, but in spite of this the Welsh Dummers multiplied such that they have become one of the largest Dummer groups. Over the years the Welsh Dummers have spread beyond the borders of Wales, some back to England, thereby losing the accent their ancestors had picked up many generations previous, and others to America and Australia like the other branches.

OTHER DUMMERS

The main groups of Dummer families have been identified above. Besides these there exists quite a number of small family groups and individuals who have not been linked to the main groups. Some of these are important inasmuch as they are the ancestors of people living today. Hopefully some pieces of information may come to light to enable some of the groups to be rescued and reunited with their families. Many will never be. Here are a few of them.

WILLIAM THE BISHOPSTOKE BLACKSMITH

William Dummer the blacksmith of Bishopstoke, Hampshire, who married Amey Scorey in 1802 was the father of 12 and grandfather of 45. His numerous descendants can now be found in England, America and Australia, many of whom would dearly love to know who William's parents were. Alas, they are still to be identified, although they were almost certainly "Pyldren" Dummers.

BANISHED!!

Robert Dummer married Mary Trigger in the mid-eighteenth century and lived in the Titchfield and Alverstoke area of Hampshire, near Fareham. Again, Robert was almost certainly a "Pyldren" Dummer. One of his descendants, William, crossed the waters of Portsmouth Harbour and set up a clothing business in Portsmouth which prospered such that by 1851 he was employing 63 workers, and had risen to prominence in the social and political life of the town. His eldest son disgraced himself by secretly marrying beneath his father's class, and the son was banished and his wife and baby son disappeared from the scene. Upon William's death a younger son inherited the business and social position. Many years later the former baby appeared upon the scene and confronted his uncle. A fascinating story.

A FOUL DEED

In Australia, 32 year old William Dummer was out of work and struggling. One night William hit the bottle, came home drunk, and hit his wife Annie with a door scraper. Annie died 3 days later. Who was William? And did he hang for his crime?

BRICKFIELDS

Brickfields feature prominently in the saga of Dummers in the nineteenth century. It was the time of great increase in population, particulary in the London area, and people needed houses to live in, which meant an enormous demand for bricks. Young Dummer sons moved to London in search of work and all too often ended up in the brickfields. John Dummer and Sophia Mattenly and their children were one such family at Hillingdon. We have yet to discover where John came from. One of their grandchildren decided that this was not the life for him and sailed for America. Another Dummer, married Susannah Peake at Shoreditch in 1861 and became a brickfield worker in Islington. Their eldest son later worked in the same industry in Hornsea. There are quite a number of these small groups working in all sorts of industries and agriculture who have not as yet been traced back beyond th nineteenth century. Tracing their origins is a fascinating challenge for today's Dummer researchers.

THE STUDY
The author is the registered member of The Guild of One-Name Studies for the family of Dummer. He has researched Dummer family history for over 40 years. Virtually all his findings have now been made available as a comprehensive book - The Family of Dummer, by Michael Dummer, Seventh Edition June 2005.

THE BOOK
The book consists of 360 A4 size pages: 111 pages of descriptive text, 150 photographs, transcripts of important wills, facsimile copies of important nineteenth century studies, family album, other relevant documents, a 55 page listing of all the entries of Dummers in the General Record Office Index of Births, Marriages and Deaths from 1837 until the mid-twentieth century, a list of all sources used in the study, and an index of persons.

WHERE TO SEE IT
Printed copies of the book can be consulted at a number of record offices and libraries, including the British Library, the Library of Congress at Washington, the Library of the Genealogical Society of Utah at Salt Lake City, the Library of the Society of Genealogists at London, Hampshire Record Office at Winchester, Southampton Archives at the Guildhall Southampton, Winchester Local Studies Library, West Sussex Record Office at Chichester, the libraries of the Hampshire Genealogical Society, the Sussex Family History Society and the Guild of One-Name Studies. Printed copies of the book are not available for purchase.

THE COMPACT DISC

The study is also available on an inexpensive CD from which the book can be printed out. Copies can be obtained from the Church Wardens of All Saints Church at Dummer village, Hampshire - the ancient church of the Dummer family. All proceeeds from the sale of the CD go towards maintenance of Dummer church. Email the church wardens at allsaintschurch.dummer@hantsweb.org.uk or go to the church website by clicking on the link below, then on Local Links, then on The Family of Dummer CDROM
www.hants.org.uk/allsaintschurchdummer

The author is also prepared to try to answer questions on Dummer family history. Email him by keying in the address below (omitting the gap in the word dummer in the address which has been put there in an attempt to avoid spam).
dum mer@one-name.org

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Examples of the arms borne by the old family of Dummer can be seen at Dummer village church and Pendomer church. At Dummer church the Arms are quartered with those of the Atmore family on the brass plate to the left of the altar. At Pendomer the recumbant figure of sir John de Dummer has the arms on his breast. The arms are described as "Azure, a golden crescent between 6 billets, 3,2,1, or". A golden crescent between golden rectangles on a blue background.

The "Pyldren" Dummers used different arms: "Azure, 3 fleur de lis or, on a chief of the second a demi-lion of the first". Whether the arms came from the Pyldren side or the Dummer side of the family is not known. The arms were originally used unofficially, but at the height of the family's prosperity 3 members sought permission to have their use regularised by the Earl Marshall, which was granted.

A little later they also requested approval to use the original arms of the Dummers of Dummer, from whom they claimed descent, however, they were only permitted to use a variant, namely: "Gules, 9 billetts argent, 4,3,2, and a bezant in the base".

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