© 2016 David E. Spencer
Introduction
This is certainly the most speculative page of my website - I would normally include only material that I have checked myself or has come from sources in which I have personal knowledge and absolute trust. The information offered below has come from many sources - my own research, that of other "searchers" of the Bailey and Calverley family histories, other websites and some old books to which I once had access. In general I have only included material derived from other websites if the same information is posted on at least several credible websites. I offer this page as an intriguing possibility that when James Calverley married Ann Nutter at Newchurch-in-Pendle, Lancashire in 1799 they were already (very!) distant cousins. If the information is true then they were both descendants of John de Bayly who died about 1391.
The "top" and "bottom" parts of this chart i.e. the ancestors of James Calverley and of Ann Nutter are well documented in Parish Registers, wills etc and we can confidently accept at least four or five generations of ancestors for both James and Ann.
Similarly the earliest events are well documented - John de Bayly did have two sons, one of whom acquired property in West Bradford whilst the other married Margaret Sherburne of Stonyhurst.
The only difficulty with the left hand column is that we know that Robert Bailey inherited from his widowed mother, Janet, but we do not know the name of her deceased husband. The difficulty with the right hand column is the immediate ancestry of James Calverley, husband of Mary Barber - I have seen several alternatives offered but all accept that he was a descendant of Robert (and one of his two wives) and then of Stephen. A will that came into my possession recently from fellow Calverley searcher Ron Calverley is that of Stephen's father Richard Calverley of Heslehead in the Parish of Gisburn who names Stephen as his heir. This leaves only Richard's own father relatively poorly documented before we encounter Medival Calverley's whose ancestry is well documented in venerable books such as "Burke's Commoners" which are easily accessed online.
It would be no great surprise to find that landed families in a relatively small area were inter-related in this way - perhaps I should be surprised that it did not happen earlier.