Jonathan Jarman Drewery

The Drewery brick wall — his parents

Open research · the line's oldest question

Mum left his Parents blank, and rightly: no record names them. Two full assaults — hers across the indexes, and ours in 2026 across findmypast and FamilySearch with the register images — have confirmed it is a real wall, and mapped exactly where it might break.

What has been ruled out

• No baptism, anywhere indexed. An all-England sweep for a Jonathan Drury/Drewry baptised 1721–1731 returns exactly two: Sibsey, 1721 (father Thomas) and Freiston, 1723 (father George) — both Boston-side marsh parishes twenty miles north, both a few years early against the stone's “aged 68”. Candidates, no more.
• Whaplode — where he first married — was a Drury colony, with four couples baptising children between 1716 and 1729 (Thomas & Mary, John & Mary, Richard & Elizabeth, Henry & Sarah). No Jonathan is among their indexed children; the one 1726 oddity the index offered (“Manier Drury”, sex unknown) proved, on the register image, to be a daughter of Thomas and Mary.
• No Drury × Jarman marriage is indexed anywhere in England (1685–1730) — the maternal-surname shortcut still gives no direct hit. (The Jarman family itself is rooted in Fleet back to 1596.)
• His parents are blank in FamilySearch's 36-source profile (MK1Z-KTN) and in every other researcher's tree.

The new scent — the family's own naming custom

His son's baptism at Gedney in 1758 shows precisely how this neighbourhood recorded a base-born child: entered under the mother's surname, carrying the father's forename, with the father named — “German, son of Elizabeth Donson, ye putative father German Drury.” If Jonathan Jarman Drury was himself base-born, his double name and his missing baptism both explain themselves at a stroke — and the custom cuts either way: a Drury mother and a Jarman father, or a Jarman mother and a Drury father (in which case his baptism would sit under Jarman, as his own son's sat under Donson). Both directions have now been tested against the indexes. An earlier note claimed a Jarman family “rooted in Fleet back to 1596”; the indexed registers show no Jarman or German family in Fleet or its neighbours at all (1660–1740), and that claim is unverified — where the byname came from is itself part of the question.

The second assault — read, not just searched (July 2026)

• The Fleet register itself was read, page by page, across the birth window (1725–1727) — the first register survives, is imaged, and records base-born and mother-only children when they occur. He is not in it. The earlier suggestion of “a register gap exactly where it matters” was wrong: there is no gap, only a genuine absence. Wherever he was baptised, it was not Fleet.
• The flipped search found exactly one candidate in the county: Jonathan German, baptised at Bottesford, 28 February 1726, son of Richard — the only Jonathan Jarman/German baptised anywhere in Lincolnshire in twenty years. Followed down, he is eliminated: he married Elizabeth Heward at Bottesford in 1762 and lived a settled life sixty miles north while our man was a Fleet-parish grazier.
• Norfolk and Cambridgeshire county sets (the marshland over the border begins five miles from Long Sutton): no Jonathan Drury baptism 1716–1736 in either.
• The nonconformist registers (a dissenting family would explain the absence of any Anglican baptism): no Jonathan Drury 1716–1736 — though the surviving meeting records for the 1720s fens are thin, so this null is weak.
• The two candidates both survive childhood. Neither the Sibsey boy (1721) nor the Freiston boy (1723) is buried at home as a child or a man — no Jonathan Drury burial within five miles of either parish, 1720–1800. Both remain alive, unaccounted for, and available to be our man; the only other adult Jonathan Drury visible in the county's mid-century marriages (Messingham, 1762) probably accounts for one of them. Running each down — Boston-side marriages, children, burials — is now the sharpest online task left.
• The neighbourhood's indexes are good, and that is itself a finding. Whaplode Drove chapelry: no Drurys. Gedney (55 baptisms indexed for 1726 alone), Holbeach (59) and Moulton (102) are all richly covered for the window, base-born entries included — so a hidden, unindexed entry in the home parishes is now unlikely, and the weight shifts to the offline documents: the licence bonds, the Bishop's Transcripts, and the wills (findmypast holds no Lincolnshire wills index — the probate registers are at Lincolnshire Archives).

Pass two — the archive actions

• To do: Lincolnshire Archives — the marriage-licence bonds and allegations: MB 1758/110 and MB 1763/403 carry his sworn age (twice), occupation and parish — the tightest fix on 1726 available anywhere — and the bonds series should be searched for the unindexed 1753 Whaplode licence.
• To do: Lincoln consistory wills: his own 1794 probate (a grazier with press notices very likely left a will); any Drury will of Whaplode or Fleet, 1726–1794, naming a son Jonathan; any Jarman will of Fleet naming a Drury child. The single likeliest unlock.
• To do: read the Gedney, Holbeach and Moulton registers page by page across 1720–1732, as was done for Fleet — the method is proven and the images are online; and at the archive, the Bishop's Transcripts for the same parishes, which sometimes carry entries the registers lack.
• To do: find the source of the “Jarmans of Fleet since 1596” note — if a 16th–17th-century Jarman presence at Fleet is real, it sits in records older than the indexed sets.
• To do: Gedney parish records, 1758 — a bastardy bond or filiation order for Elizabeth Donson's son would name German Drury formally; and the boy German's own later life is untraced.
• To do: full follow-downs of the Sibsey 1721 and Freiston 1723 Jonathans — both survive childhood and neither is buried at home; trace their Boston-side marriages, children and burials until each is either accounted for or becomes our leading candidate. Their fathers' (Thomas's and George's) wills may do it quickly.
• To do: locate the Gentleman's Magazine death notice on Google Books — Mum cited vol. 74; the 1794 volume is 64.