Thornton
 The Family Story
The Two John Thorntons

Danny (left in the photo) and Major (right in the photo) Thornton were the youngest of eleven children of John and Isabella Thornton. John Thornton who was born in Cutsyke, Castleford on 29th January 1875, is the great-grandfather of my wife, Tracey along with many many others since not only did he have a huge family but so did many of his children and their children in turn.

But we'll get back to this John Thornton in a little while because this story concerns itself with another John Thornton born some three centuries earlier not in Castleford but a few miles North East of there in the little village of Whitkirk just North of Temple Newsam.

Temple Newsam is a manor to the East of Leeds named for the Knights Templar the first Lords of the Manor there.

Whitkirk is a village just North of there built around the little church of St. Mary's. It's a place of rich fertile land and was rich in other important minerals in the Middle Ages too, namely coal. The coal there has been mined at least since the Middle Ages and perhaps even earlier than that and it's with one such Elizabethan miner that we're concerned here: John Thornton.

According to research in the Whitkirk parish records which starting officially taking records of baptisms, burials and weddings in 1603, there was a John Thornton of that village probably as early as the late 1590s. How do we know? Because his children start appearing in the baptism records in 1623. That was the year his daughter Ann was baptised followed two years later by his first son also called John.