Seagroatt One-Name Study

(Click on picture to enlarge) Distribution in the 1881 Census for England by Poor Law Union

Seagroatt
One-Name Study

Topics

About the Seagroatt One-Name Study
Variants
Origin of the surname
Distribution of the name
Data
Links
Contact Details

About the Seagroatt One-Name Study

SEAGROATT is the maiden name of my wife, and I began to research her line from Poplar in the East End of London in about 1988. This rare East Anglian surname (there are less than 100 entries in the UK telephone book) appears to have spread out from the Yarmouth area (where it appears as SECRET in early parish registers) to the Norwich and Newmarket areas ca1700, and then down to London.

Some surname variants are SAGROTT, SEGROTT, SEGRODT and possibly SECRET(T). I registered a one-name study for these names with the Guild of One-Name Studies in 1995. There is also a bulletin board for the name on Ancestry.com. I have a number of family trees relating to Sagrott in Norfolk, London and Essex, Segrott from Ousden, Suffolk who settled in the Lambeth area of London, and Seagroatt in Norwich, Norfolk and in the Stepney & Poplar area of East London. Most of these I can supply as GEDCOM files or narrative family trees. A number of these lines have settled in North America and Australia. Copies of any trees that you hold will be most welcome. I have a tree of SECRET in Kirkley, Suffolk supplied by Caroline Smith, but I do not have any trees for the surname SECRETT in Barnet or Buckinghamshire and would welcome information on these.

Variants

Some surname variants are SAGROTT, SEGROTT, SEGRODT and possibly SECRET(T). In Australia the name is now mostly spelt as SEAGROTT.

Origin of the surname

The origins of the surname are uncertain, although there are several traditions that they came from the Continent, perhaps France, Germany or the Netherlands. My own theory is that the name derives from the Dutch/Flemish words See, meaning a lake and Groot, meaning large. Thus the name may first have been given to a person who lived beside a lake or stretch of water. The name SEEGROOT can be found in the parish registers of Krefeld on the River Rhine ca1700. In England the name is found from about 1540 in East Anglia, first around Yarmouth on the Norfolk coast (where SECRETT is also found), then inland around Norwich, Newmarket and down into Suffolk around Ousden. The variant SAGROTT appears to have originated in Stoke Ferry, Norfolk. There were also a few occurrences of SEGRODT in the City of London ca1680. The SEGROTTs came from Suffolk to London ca1800, and I have been unable to link them to our Seagroatt line. Heraldic records show no grants of Arms. Many followed the trade of Cordwainers (Shoemakers) in early times.

Seagroatt is my wife's family name which I began researching about 1989 after the death of her father Edgar Seagroatt in 1988. Much of the spade work had been done back to 1830 by a cousin Lawrence Seagroatt (L.E.G.S.) who had hired a professional genealogist to produce a tree going back to Thomas Seagroatt (ca1794-1861), a Shipwright in the London Docks at Poplar, Middlesex. I have since found his baptism and marriage, and also filled in a lot of gaps on the tree by contacting other cousins. His parents were Roger, a Shoemaker and Elizabeth who lived at New Road in Stepney ca1785-1800. It seems probable that Roger came from Norwich in Norfolk, as there is a baptism (see IGI) at St.John Timberland in 1741 of a Roger Seagroatt son of Roger who was also a Shoemaker/Cordwainer, but I have no firm documentary evidence, and have been unable to locate the marriage of Roger & Elizabeth ca1780 in any indexes or East London registers. Most present-day Seagroatts descend from Thomas (1790-1861) a Ships Joiner who lived in Cottage Row, Poplar.

Distribution of the name

The map above shows the distribution in the 1881 UK census for England by Poor Law Union for the main variants. Secret(t) was clustered around Yarmouth, Segrott around Newmarket and London, and Seagroatt in the Poplar, Limehouse and Stepney area of East London. Two SEAGROATT brothers emigrated to Australia in the 1860's & settled in the silver-mining area of Inverell- they have many descendants dispersed across Australia. Another line from a Thomas SEAGROATT settled in New York, USA ca1890.

Data

If you are seeking a birth, marriage or death in England or Wales from 1837, you can search my extensive extracts from the GRO indexes on my personal web site at www.sherwoodfam.plus.com/ancestry (Tip: There are many births and some deaths where a forename was not registered. These appear in the Indexes as Male or Female.) There are gaps for some years which you may need to supplement from FreeBMD or other sites.

I also have English extracts from some parish registers, census returns, wills, probate and military records. Pictures of various family members and links to other researchers may be found on my web site below.

Links

Visit my SEAGROATT Ancestry web site at:

http://www.sherwoodfam.plus.com/ancestry/seagroatt.htm

Contact details

For further information, contact:

Dr Philip J Sherwood
Niwa Taku,
1 Wilton Drive,
Weymouth,
Dorset
DT4 0DE
UNITED KINGDOM
E-mail:

This page last updated 8 March 2008.