General Notes

Hugh Sargent, gentleman

Hugh Sargent (Sariant), the earliest known ancestor of the family, lived in Courteenhall, County of Northampton. Courteenhall was the inheritance of the Wake family, which traces its descent back to Hereward the Wake, to a time anterior to the Norman Conquest. It is five and a quarter miles southerly from the town of Northampton, and in 1831 contained one hundred and forty-four inhabitants. The church is dedicated to Saint Peter and Saint Paul.

Prefixed to the first volume of the parish register, which begins in the year 1538, and folded to its size, is a large piece of parchment, on which is very neatly transcribed many pedigrees. One of them is of the family of Sargent. There can be no doubt that this piece of work, which is both most useful and rare, was written by a former rector, who had at first hand the facts which he recorded.

The rector of the church, Rev. Archibald Wake (1895) says, "The parchment shows that the family were in Courteenhall in 1554, and were of gentle blood; and possibly the Sargents were in the parish before a Wake entered it."

Hugh Sargent must have been born about the year 1530. He died Feb. 23, 1595/6, (buried 1st of March).

That he heeded the Scripture injunction, "Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth," is evidenced by the fact that he was the father of fifteen children, the eldest having been born in 1556, and the youngest in 1579.


From the section titled "Genealogical Research in England: Gifford-Sargent - From A Genealogical Chart in the Parish Registers of Courteenhall, Co. Northampton"; Contributed by G. Andrews Moriarty, Jr., A.M., LL.B., of Newport, R.I., and communicated by the Committee on English Research (appearing in Vol. 75, Jan. 1921, New England Historic and Genealogical Register, p. 59):

In the "Sargent Genealogy," published in 1895 by the late Aaron Sargent of Somerville, Mass., the ancestry of WIlliam Sargent, one of the early settlers of Malden, Mass., is carried back to his grandfather, Hugh Sargent of Courteenhall, co. Northampton, England; but the statements about the English Sargents printed in this book contain several errors, the documentary evidence on which these statements are based is omitted, and comparatively little information is given about the ancestry of Margaret Gifford, wife of Hugh Sargent and grandmother of the New England immigrant.