The Hunts: from Gosfield to Curragh Chase
The first of the distaff ladders of my father's grandmother, found in July 2026: an Essex family, a Cromwellian colonel, a house in the Limerick woods, and a legend the heralds themselves put in quotation marks.
The printed book carries the Lanes to John Hamilton Lane of Lanespark, and there it left his wife, Jane Hunt, married in 1783, a name without a country. In July 2026 four printed pedigrees, checked against each other and against the registers, gave Jane her whole ladder back.
It begins at Gosfield in Essex, where William Hunte died on 12 August 1552 and lies buried with his wife Ellen Cracherode. Their son Henry, High Sheriff of Essex, married at Gosfield on 2 April 1573 a bride the old pedigrees called "Jane Vere", claimed as a daughter of the Hon. Aubrey de Vere, son of the fifteenth Earl of Oxford. For two and a half centuries that claim was the family's grandest unproven possession, strong enough that in 1832 a Hunt took the name de Vere by royal licence on the strength of it. In July 2026 the claim went to trial against the documents, and it won: Jane's parentage is now proven three times over, and the whole story, up the Earls of Oxford to Agincourt, Magna Carta and the edge of Domesday Book, has a chapter of its own. The poets Sir Aubrey and Aubrey Thomas de Vere of Curragh Chase remain collaterals, one generation after Jane left the family; the difference is that the name they assumed turns out to have been the family's honest inheritance all along.
The documented line runs through Colonel John Hunt, born 1582, one of the '49 officers, his colonel's commission dated 24 April 1650; and then to Vere Hunt, the Cromwellian settler, who planted himself at Curragh, later Curragh Chase, in county Limerick, and at Glangoole in Tipperary, in 1657, served as Commissioner for county Limerick, and was dead by June 1681. His son John Hunt of Glangoole was born in 1633 and died in 1736, in Cokayne's dry phrase "at the alleged age of 103". The joke writes itself until you do the arithmetic: the two dates agree exactly.
John's son the Reverend Vere Hunt of Curragh, buried at Kilcooly Abbey in 1759, married in 1712 Constantia Piers of Tristernagh, whose own ladder is a chapter of this edition. Their son Vere Hunt married secondly, in May 1760, Anne Browne of New Grove in county Clare, which opens the Westropp chapter. And their daughter Jane married John Hamilton Lane in 1783 and carried all of it, Essex and Limerick, legend and arithmetic, into the line this whole site descends from.
Every rung above is documented except where this page says otherwise; the sources are the Hunt and De Vere pedigrees in Burke's, Cokayne's Complete Baronetage, and the registers, weighed against each other, with Cokayne given the casting vote where they disagree.