Arthur Ward

✓ Validated against records · 2026-07-02

Arthur Ward was a man of the Isle of Axholme — that low island of firm ground among the drowned levels of the Trent. On 27 June 1671 he married Susanna Hewettson at the church of St Martin, Owston Ferry, a Trent-side village then still half river-port and half farming township; the register sets him down as “of the Ferry.”

The couple began at Owston Ferry, where their first child, Thomas, was baptised on 9 November 1672 and buried there just eight days later. They then made their family a little inland, at Epworth — the next parish but one to Haxey — where the rest were christened between 1675 and 1686: Isabel, Helen (who lived only to 1681), Isabella, John, and, the youngest, Susanna. It is through Susanna, baptised in the summer of 1686 and afterwards the wife of Thomas Brock of Haxey, that this line descends.

Of Arthur himself, before his marriage, nothing certain survives. No baptism for him has come to light in the Axholme registers, whose early- and mid-seventeenth-century pages are thin and broken; his own parents, and the year of his birth — near 1645, reckoning back from his wedding — are still unknown. He stands at the edge of what the record will give: the man at the Ferry, and the family he raised at Epworth.

Composed from validated records · 2026-07-02

Family

Marriage

SHSpouseSusanna Hewettson

Children

SWChild · the line continuesSusanna Wardmain line1686–1753

Historical context

The Isle of Axholme and the Great Drainage

The Isle of Axholme, where the Wards lived, was an island only in the old sense — a low reach of firm ground raised over the marshes where the Trent, the Idle and the Don ran together. For centuries its people had lived off the wet commons around them: turf cut for fuel, fish and wildfowl taken from the meres, cattle put out on the summer pastures. It made them, as their neighbours said, a stubborn and independent folk.

In 1626 Charles I set the Dutch engineer Cornelius Vermuyden to drain it. Rivers were re-cut and embanked, and some seventy-five thousand acres of Hatfield Chase and the Isle were turned from fen to field — with a third of the drained land granted to Vermuyden and his investors as their reward, most of it common ground the Islanders had always held. They did not take it quietly: from 1630 the commoners of Epworth and its neighbours rioted against the works and fought the drainers in the courts, a struggle that outlasted the century. When Arthur Ward married at Owston Ferry in 1671, that quarrel over the drowned commons was the living argument of his parish and his lifetime.

Owston Ferry itself was the Isle's river-gate — a Trent-side port and ferry-crossing, its church of St Martin standing within the earthworks of a Norman castle long since slighted. Arthur was set down there simply as “of the Ferry”: a man of that riverside parish, at the edge of the reclaimed fen.

Composed for this site from published local history — the family’s world, not one of Mum’s records.

Life

Confirmed — anchored to a recordEstimated — inferred

1671

Married

27 June 1671 at Owston Ferry

Arther Ward, of Ferry — & Susanna Hewettson — married at Owston Ferry (St Martin), 27 June 1671.— Marriage, Owston Ferry (1671)

Confirmed in index record Evidence

Found in an index or transcript — the original page not yet read:

Marriage, Owston Ferry (1671) — Arthur Ward & Susanna Hewettson, married at St Martin's, Owston Ferry, 27 June 1671 — Lincolnshire Marriages & Banns (Lincolnshire FHS, Isle of Axholme Marriages, entry no. 2366); cross-confirmed on FamilySearch, England Marriages 1538–1973 (ark:/61903/1:1:NV5Y-J5V), original place “Owston, Lincoln.” No register image survives online — a society transcription; the Isle of Axholme registers are not imaged for this date. index entry — original not yet seen

1672

Their firstborn, Thomas — baptised at Owston Ferry

1672 at Owston Ferry

Thomas sonne of Arthur ward and Susanna his wife was baptized November ye 9th day 1672.— Baptism, Owston Ferry (1672)

Read at the image record Evidence

Confirmed against the original record, read at the image:

Baptism, Owston Ferry (1672) — Thomas, son of Arthur Ward and Susanna his wife, baptised at Owston Ferry (St Martin), 9 November 1672 — and buried there eight days later, on the 17th. Owston Ferry parish register, Lincolnshire Baptisms & Burials (Lincolnshire Archives; findmypast images OWSTON_FERRY_PAR_1_1 f.0829 and f.0849). The register itself reads the baptism as the 9th; one index gives the 2nd. This is the first original register to name Arthur and Susanna together as a married couple — the 1671 marriage survives only as a later transcription. read at the image

Our research

Where did Arthur Ward come from?

Open research · Isle of Axholme

Arthur is the oldest Ward this line can yet name with confidence — but he is named from the front, by his marriage and his children, not from behind. Two walls stand over him.

The identification he rests on

That our Susanna Ward (Thomas Brock's wife) is the Susanna christened at Epworth in 1686, daughter of Arthur Ward, is a high-probability reading, not a proven one — the adjacent parish, and a marriage age near thirty, both point to her, but no record ties the 1716 bride to the 1686 child directly. Everything about Arthur below therefore inherits that “very probably.”

His own origins — the wall

No baptism. No Arthur Ward christening is indexed in the Isle or its borders for c.1642–1655, the window his 1671 marriage implies. The Axholme registers of those decades are sparse and broken (Civil War and Commonwealth), so his birth may simply never have been recorded — or survives only in an unindexed original.
His burial is likewise unfound; whether he died at Epworth, Owston Ferry, or elsewhere in the Isle is open.

A hint from his children

The baptism has been sought hard and not found — on findmypast, on FamilySearch, and in the transcribed wills — so the Owston Ferry register almost certainly does not reach back to his birth (c.1645, in the Commonwealth years). But the names of his children give a lead. By the old custom, a first son took his father's father's name — and Arthur's first son, baptised at Owston Ferry in 1672, was Thomas. So Arthur's father was probably a Thomas Ward of the Isle. It is a hint, not a proof: no record ties them, and until one turns up the name stays a lead.

The record that anchors Arthur — his 1671 marriage to Susanna Hewettson at Owston Ferry — survives only as a society transcription; the original Isle of Axholme register is not imaged for this period.