Hello Phill
I'm having great fun tracing the Stonyer millers in my family. As far as I can see, they all worked watermills. The earlist confirmed location I have is Sides Mill, midway between Snelston and Mayfield on the Derbyshire/Staffordshire borders. Then, I have various christenings that put them in London, Surrey; St Albans, Herts; and Atherstone in Warwickshire. From there they made their way to Shropshire to the area around Chelmarsh, working mills at Wrickton, Deuxhill, and Eudon; Belbroughton at Bell End Mill in Worcestershire, now demolished to make way for road widening
; and Lower Mitton (Stourport), also in Worcestershire. I also have records of christenings in Wombourne, which possibly points to Smetsow Mill, Seighford and Checkley. There is a tentative link to Sutton Coldfield in the mid 1600s via a Stonyer "grynder" whose will requests he is buried in Sutton Coldfield churchyard, and other tentative links to other mills in Staffordshire - viz Blythe Bridge and Great Bridgford.
Most census returns list the millers as "journeyman", which implies they were hired for the job by the mill owner. Most maps seems to show that they occupied a house and possibly several acres of land alongside the mill. Clearly they were very mobile, with the sons moving to new mills when they had completed whatever apprenticeships were necessary, or when the ownership of the mill changed hands. A lot of my links are tentative based on groups of chistenings and the use of first names that seem to be common in the family. An unusual surname also helps a little, although it's frequently mis-spelt, and on occasion just left as an initial!
Finally, one Stonyer miller made his way to New Zealand where he firmly established himself and his sons as millers, and developing machinery for processing flax, too. I found over 2000 newspaper references for him and his family (most advertisements, but some really "juicy" stuff too
)
I've used the Mills Archive to try and trace my ancestors, but the information there is very scant considering just how many mills there must have been. Tim Booth of the Midland Mills group has been very useful: he has actually resored Wrickton Mill where my Gt Gt Grandfather worked with his uncle. However, as the mill workers were probably not the mill owners, there's precious few actual records that can be found. Some mills may have belonged to larger estates, and it may be possible to find references in the estate records, but whether records of millers hired have been kept is another matter.
One intersting side note is the number of children who became engineers rather than following on the milling tradition, so it would seem that millers must have been, as a rule, reasonably well educated, practical people.
I have heard that they were not popular, though, as people often suspected them of handing back less flour milled that grain supplied
David
