| Featured Book - Dryden Family History by Brian Dreadon | |||
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Synopsis
This book tells the history of the Dryden family name (also spelt as Driden, Dryden, Dreadon, Draydon etc.) based on comprehensive research into church registers; wills, charters held in national & private archives, and previously published works. The name first appeared in Scotland as “de Driden” indicating that it was originally the name of a location, almost certainly the barony of Dryden on the Roslin estates near Edinburgh. Land charters from the Scottish National Archives prove that the territorial designation of “de Driden” or plain “Driden” was used bysuccessive generations of the St Clair de Driden family, male line descendants and a branch of the aristocratic St Clair of Roslin family. This research has enabled the compilation of an entirely new family tree for the St Clair family who held the manor of Dryden from about 1420 and used the name of Dryden in some form for the next 200 years. The use of the Dryden name is followed down through the Scottish records from 1296, generation by generation to the beginnings of the modern Dryden family in the border counties of Roxburghshire, Cumberland and Northumberland during the early 1500s. Then much circumstantial evidence is presented to support the theory of William St Clair of Driden (a lawyer, jousting champion and courtier in the household of the Queen of Scotland), following that Queen into English exile in 1515 and becoming known as William Driden of Walton in Cumberland. William was granted lands in the north of England, from where it appears that his various sons became the ancestors of the continuing Dryden family located either side of the England-Scotland border. The descent of the Dryden family in England is described down through each generation to the present day for both the senior line of Canons Ashby Northamptonshire, and its cadets Dreadon of Cornwall and Dryden of Yorkshire. The Cornish immigrant families of Dreadon in New Zealand and Draydon and Dridan in Australia follow on. Family trees have been constructed for all those “Dryden” families, as well as the earliest Drydens in Roxburghshire, Northumberland and Cumberland. Additional chapters cover related topics including the extraordinary literary achievements of the Dryden family, the origins of the Dryden coat of arms, the links to Masonic lodges and the Roslin Chapel, modern DNA studies, and the St Clair family's earlier ancestral history in France. The book is in black & white, A4 size, 446 pages with over 50 photos and illustrations. 50 pages of various Dryden family trees are appended, with charts, maps, a 6 page bibliography and an index of individuals named in the text.
About the author
A great-grandson of William Dreadon who migrated from Cornwall England to New Zealand in 1865, Brian Dreadon was born to a northern farming family on the Kaipara Harbour. He took Law at Auckland University with studies in History and English Literature. After a varied career in industrial negotiations for national and international companies, the contract monitoring of chartered foreign factory fishing trawlers around New Zealand and the Southern Ocean, he took up senior management roles within Legal Aid. In addition to a variety of shorter term jobs including work as a freelance writer and illustrator in New Zealand, an accountant for the London Borough of Camden and a train driver on the London Underground, Brian has spent time in Russia and Ukraine with the family and friends of his Russian wife Nina and daughter Natalia. He is now retired in Hamilton New Zealand.
ISBN: 978-0-473-23694-6 Author: Brian Dreadon Soft Cover
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