The Family Tree

The Bishop family

The Bishop family have been traced back as far as the late 1700's to what was then a village, but now a small town, called Soham in Cambridgeshire which is roughly halfway between Newmarket, Suffolk and Ely, Cambridgeshire.


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By the time of the 1851 census, the Bishops had moved from Soham, to a farm in Twineham, West Sussex. They stayed here only a few years and by 1858 they had returned to Cambridgeshire to live in Fordham. A few years later the family establishes itself in Wicken, with numerous Bishop children being born in Burwell, Cambridgeshire - again, not that far away from Soham.

During a short period in the late 1800s, the Bishop family are involved in Coprolite Digging - essentially the mining of fossilised dinosaur droppings to produce fertilizer. This odd bounty proved to be massively profitable and caused a 'rush' of digging in the Cambridgeshire region, but fell into decline by the mid-1880s.

My records are indebted to fellow researcher and cousin, Gerard Kelly who kindly provided me with some more Bishop info whilst I was concentrating on other branches of my family tree research.


Further Reading