Pledgers of Littlebury and Great Chesterford
Pam Griffiths
This account was written because I found some key differences between my research on this family and the version which appears in Megan Ridgewell's The Pledger Family Archives. While I have respect for the enormous amount of work which has gone into that book, the author had one of my direct ancestors linked to an entirely different spouse, and another descended from a different branch of the family. So I set out to try and confirm or disprove my version of events. I am making what I found available to other researchers not to belittle other versions, but to encourage those who may be connected to this family to look at the original records rather than accept verbatim what has previously been written.
The key players in this story seem to have spent much of their lives migrating between Great Chesterford and Littlebury, which, along with the limited choice of Christian names, makes it very difficult to disentangle the various branches. I have numbered all the various Georges, Williams etc, both in the account which follows and the appended tree, in an attempt to make it clear which one is under discussion. I am quite willing to believe that I may have made some wrong deductions, but I am sure that my direct ancestor, Sarah Pledger, born 1794, was the daughter of William Pledger and Sarah Mason, not of William Pledger and Elizabeth Bailey of Chippenham.
All key parish register details are taken from filmed versions of the original documents on microfiche at the Essex Record Office unless specified otherwise.
Please feel free to view the pdf version of my research. You may also download a pdf copy of the family tree to clarify the Pledger relationships.
If you do not have a copy of Adobe Acrobat Reader, it is available for free download here.