Our Beginnings

All the Voddens known to be alive in the world today descend from just one known couple: Thomas Vodden and Christian Mu(y)les (Malles, Moles) of St. Giles in the Wood in North Devon.  However, they were not the Adam and Eve of the family.  In the early 1600’s, when they were alive, there were a few families concentrated in the Cornwall and Devon counties. So other than Thomas and Christian, who are the other Vodden families?

Records prior around 1600, England

A perusal of the records available on Ancestry.co.uk reveals possible other variations of the surname and possible other family. There are records with many of the variants in Yorkshire, Dorset, London, Herefordshire, Staffordshire, Surrey, etc.

Questionable

Thomas Vodden and Christian Mules lived nearly 400 years ago but they appear to be the root of the Vodden (Vawden) family tree. They are the furthest back we can definitively trace the family, and it appears that every Vodden (Vawden) can be traced back to this one couple.

They had two known sons, Lawrence and William, through which we can trace our beginnings to this family from the results of DNA tests currently taken. There are two other males, Hannibal and John, who could also be from this family, but the descendants of these men need to be researched, and hopefully, DNA matches discovered.

Destruction

A crucial question, to which we may never know the answer, is whether Thomas and Christian were new to the area, or whether they were simply the descendants of earlier Voddens living in the area for whom records are lost in the mists of time. The question is made more difficult because many of the Great Torrington records were lost in a fire that destroyed the Church on February 15, 1645, during the Civil War. There was another serious fire and loss of records said to have occurred in 1724. Church records for Great Torrington only exist from 1616 forward, although there is a transcript going back to 1597 for some records.

Challenges

As anyone familiar with Devon Family History will understand, the early Vodden records, of which many existed, have been destroyed.  In a worthy effort to protect records from the perils of war, most Devon wills were collected at Exeter for security.  The plan failed since the storage location was itself bombed on May 4, 1942, destroying a valuable resource. Parish Registers only began, in most cases, in 1538.  Those from the first 100 years or so are hard to read, and transcriptions are spotty, particularly with a name like Vodden, which had a variety of spellings, and many more transcription errors. We hope to find some record of Thomas and Christian‘s marriage or birth and some information as to where they left to settle in St. Giles in the Wood. We started searching the records of the Rolle Estate, which are mostly un-indexed. However, living in Canada makes visiting the Devon Records Office difficult.