Research Notes
Aims of this website.
Because there are few enough Welbanks in the world to make it possible, I would like to turn this into the Welbank one-name study. This obviously means including the details of all Welbanks in the world who have ever had their existence recorded. It most likely includes Wellbank and other spellings; and possibly is linked to the Wallbanks; see Ian Wallbank's one name study at: www.one-name.org/profiles/wallbank.html
Current Research Lines
Christopher (1743?-1786) who married Ann Knapp.
Christopher married Ann Knapp in 1779 (4 children) and newspaper announcements of his death record that he was an attorney at law.
Unfortunately records of articles from the time have been lost, so there is no record of who his father was, but it is recorded that he completed articles in 1760 with Christopher Welbank 1720-1793, who married Mary Dawson in 1765 (6 children). This Christopher is quite securely identified as the son of a Northallerton shoemaker and great-grandson of a yeoman farmer of North Cowton, Yorks. Janetta Bishop Mitchell, a close friend of Elizabeth Gaskell, was a grandchild and Thomas Welbank Fowle was a great-grandchild. He is related to Welbanks from Aldborough/Boroughbridge, who include civil servants who lived at The Tower of London, and members of the Royal College of Surgeons.
He has a nephew Christopher born in 1743 who is slightly too young to be articled in 1755, but is the most likely candidate for "our" Christopher at the moment. It would be ideal to find information that securely establishes this, but it's hard to imagine where it might be found.
I (Margaret, 2021) have collected all references to Welbanks, Wellbanks and Welbanckes that I can find online. A useful index to Court of Common Pleas rolls held at the National Archives, has several Mediaeval lawsuits involving husbandmen of North Cowton which I have started to transcribe and translate from Latin. They suggest that Welbanks acquired land in North Cowton by marriage into the Laton family. It's possible to construct quite extensive tentative Welbank trees from parish and legal records in North Cowton and New Malton, Yorkshire, where there are multiple families. Birth records give the first name of the father, in some cases there is more than one man with the same name in the town but they may be distinguished by profession or older/younger, or by recent marriage or age of wife. There are also many parish records of one-off families (eg a marriage and several children following shortly afterwards), mostly in Yorkshire, which I haven't been able to link into larger families and haven't yet included on this site, but they would fit into a one-name study. I am interested in the ancestry of Thomas Welbank and Captain George Welbank, two Loyalists in the US who led adventurous lives. Thomas Welbank founded the Welbanks family in Canada, which is well documented elsewhere.
I have continued some lines after the Welbank surname is lost, to trace the use of Welbank as a middle name and to see if there are living descendants.
I have a lot of work to do making sure all sources are added; much comes from parish records held online.
Please help expand the tree.
This TNG website allows us to split the tree into branches and permit any of you to edit/update your own branch of the family tree, upload pictures, etc. ... to do this you need a login and password which you can get from me: paul@welbank.net.
... to be continued
Interesting Links
Welbank references in various publications; (not including The Times)
http://www.genesreunited.co.uk/searchbna.page/results?datavolume=britishnewspaperarchives&keywords=welbank&page=1
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