THE MUDDLE FAMILIES

THE LINEAGE & HISTORY OF THE MUDDLE FAMILIES OF THE WORLD

INCLUDING VARIANTS MUDDEL, MUDDELL, MUDLE & MODDLE

 

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THE DORSET MUDDLE FAMILIES

THE WIMBORNE MUDDLES

 

Introduction

William snr. & Elizabeth Muddle’s Family

William jnr. & Elizabeth Muddle’s Family

William & Elizabeth/Ellen Mudle’s Family

Leonard & Henrietta/Emma Mudle’s Family

Henry & Emily Mudle’s Family

Frederick & Caroline Mudle’s Family

Index of Family Members

Charts

 

 

Introduction

 

Chart of the Overall Family Tree for the Wimborne Muddles

 

 

The earliest the Wimborne Muddles have been traced back to is a William and Elizabeth Muddle having children in the parish of Marnhull in the north of the county of Dorset from 1726 to 1747. It’s thought that they had probably come from the parish of Buckhorn Weston just to the north as this was where they had their children baptised, and where they were buried.

Their two sons moved to the parish of Lydlinch, married and had children. The youngest, John, seems to have been very dependent on handouts from the parish and his few descendants had died out by the late 19th century. The elder son, William, who married another Elizabeth, was probably a farmer as he owned land and paid tax. He had moved his family to Wimborne Minster by 1780 where he and his wife died a few years later.

Their son William continued the family line by marrying Elizabeth Martin in 1784, to give three generations of Williams marrying an Elizabeth. They lived at Wimborne Minster where William was an innkeeper, and they had eleven children before William’s early death in 1799. Two of their daughters married at Wimborne Minster, but Elizabeth and the rest of her surviving children moved from Dorset to London where Elizabeth died in 1824. They lived mostly in the Battersea area of London. It was after the move to London that some members of the family started using their mother’s maiden name of Martin, while others changed the spelling of their name to Mudle, and some, very confusingly, used all three names interchangeably.

William and Elizabeth’s eldest son, another William, did quite well investing in property but he never married. The main line of descent continued down through a younger son, George, who was a tailor and married Mary Ann Pudifoot in 1843 and had five children. This generation mostly used the surname Mudle with Martin as a middle name.

The line of descent for the Wimborne Muddles now continues with George and Mary Ann’s son William, who was in the merchant navy before he married Sarah Georgina Clayton in 1862. They had ten children, most born in Lambeth while William was working as a platelayer on the railway, and it is from four of their sons that most those with the name Mudle in the 20th and 21st centuries are descended.

The eldest of these sons was William George Martin Mudle who married twice, in 1891 and 1909, and had a total of eleven children, five of whom died as young children. The newspaper reports of the inquests into the deaths of two of these children and also William’s first wife, illustrate graphically the poor conditions under which they were living, as the family of a labourer, in late Victorian and Edwardian London, and their seemingly resigned attitude to these conditions. This family stayed in the immediate area of London.

The second of these sons was Leonard Martin Mudle who also married twice, in 1892 and 1905, but only had six children, and only one died in infancy. This family also mostly stayed in the London area with one member venturing as far as Somerset and another to Hampshire. The most successful member of this family was Leonard’s son Arthur who built up a flourishing business in the manufacture of cork products and bottle caps.

The third of these sons was Henry Martin Mudle who married in 1895 and had four children. William, the eldest of Henry’s sons, moved to Portsmouth and built up a small chain of grocery and shoe shops in southern Hampshire. In 1974 William’s son Jeff sailed off to the Caribbean with most of his family in his self-built ketch, resulting in some of this family settling in Canada and the USA. Harry the second of Henry’s sons joined the Royal Navy as a boy, served through the First World War and married in Malta. He raised a family on Malta and then after returning with his family to England for a while they migrated to Victoria in Australia.

The fourth of these sons was Frederick Jesse Mudle who married in 1904 and had six children, one of whom died in infancy. After having lived in the London area until 1949 Frederick, with his wife and the families of his three youngest daughters, all migrated to Western Australia.

 

Copyright © Derek Miller 2005-2015

Last updated 10 April 2015

 

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