Searching for a Huguenot Link

 

                                                 Costume designs for the original production of Les Huguenots, 1836

 

I love a good mystery. Right now, I'm reading Final Account by Peter Robinson, one of the Inspector Banks series. In spite of having at least 5 other books on the go, I have a hard time putting the mystery down. Every once in a while, a family mystery absorbs me in the same way. I'm working on one of those family puzzles now.

It was probably inevitable that the NIGS course I'm taking about English Non-conformist religions would lead me astray. I was meant to be working on my Chambers family but I'm running behind in the course modules and haven't gotten to the Congregationalists yet. I got waylaid by the Huguenots.

Two surnames in my family tree make me suspicious that they are of French origin; those of Arment and Argent. Many Huguenots in England brought their skills in silk weaving to their new country. A strange connection that, given the story of the two Thomas Arments, father and son, who were tried in the Old Bailey for receiving stolen cloth. This blog covered that story in a series of posts which starts at http://genihistorypath.blogspot.com/2018/08/ with the title Adding to the Family Story: London Criminal Records.

It was one of those posts which led to email correspondence with a fellow Arment researcher. He outlined how he believed my line went back from Thomas Arment senior to a Huguenot who immigrated to London from what was once the Dauphine region of France. We found the same parents for Thomas who was born in Bramfield, Suffolk in 1787 to Samuel Arment and his wife Alice (formerly Puttock). Now to see if I can get back closer to the Huguenot Arment immigrant to London.

As for the other possible Huguenot line, that of the Argents, looking at a map I was struck by how close (at least by car) Halstead, Essex, the home for a time of the Argents, was to Bramfield, Suffolk where the Arments were. Both of them were also not far from Ipswich, which, my course work tells me, still has Huguenot registers in existence.

 

Images: 

Huguenot costumes -  By Unknown author - http://www.bnf.fr/, Public Domain,  https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=76317233