♂Christopher Salmon

Christopher Salmon (1586 – 1625) is given in the family record as a man of Laxton, Nottinghamshire, the husband of Sarah Curtis and the father of Elizabeth Salmon. He was the ninth great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through his daughter Elizabeth Salmon (1612–1681). No document naming him has been found, and the Laxton parish register does not support the birth date the family record gives him.

Life

The family record gives his birth as 30 July 1586 at Laxton and his death there in 1625. Neither date carries a source. The same two dates appear in a grave index, and the family record probably took them from it rather than from a register. His parents are not known.

The family record gives his wife as Sarah Curtis and makes him the father of Elizabeth Salmon, born in 1612 at St Giles Cripplegate in the City of London, who became the wife of Thomas Curtis of Wethersfield in the Connecticut Colony. No record of the marriage has been found. Laxton’s own marriage register begins only in 1629, and a printed transcript of the parish’s marriages, which starts in 1607, holds no Salmon marriage before 1629. No known document gives Elizabeth the surname Salmon either, so the link between the Laxton couple and the Wethersfield family rests on the family record alone.

Notes

The Laxton register

The parish register of Laxton survives from the 1560s. The baptisms for the year 1586 are nine entries, and none of them is a Salmon; a July baptism would fall in the middle of that year’s entries, so the absence is not an accident of the calendar. No Christopher Salmon is baptized at Laxton in any surviving year before 1697, although the baptisms for 1572 to 1576 are missing from the volume.

The register does name a Christopher Salmon at Laxton, usually written in the clerk’s abbreviation “xpofer”. He had five children baptized there between November 1602 and 1610, and a child of his was buried there in 1612. None of the entries names the children’s mother. A man whose first child was baptized in 1602 had married by about 1601 and was probably born in the 1570s or earlier, so the man in the register is very probably an older Christopher Salmon and not the one the family record has born in 1586. Those children are not attributed to him.

The 1625 death cannot be tested in the register. After 1620 the volume becomes a file of loose yearly returns, and those for the middle of the 1620s are not in it. A Christopher Salmon had children baptized in 1627 and 1633 at Egmanton, about three miles from Laxton, the second with a wife named Margaret. Those baptisms fall after the recorded death, so either that man was someone else or the 1625 date is wrong. The bishop’s copies of the Laxton register, a separate series that could answer both questions, are not among the sources cited here.