Among the numerous resources and hyperlinks provided by Helen Barrell's extensive
Essex & Suffolk Surnames website are lists of the principal names featured in Joseph James Muskett's
Suffolk Manorial Families, being the County Visitations and other Pedigrees. His first two volumes were assessed by the editor of
East Anglian Miscellany in 1919 (no 5,383) as the most trustworthy and reliable of all Suffolk genealogical works. The preface to
Volume 1 reveals the effort expended to earn such high esteem:
The leading idea of the present work is to give the pedigrees, carefully elaborated from contemporary documents, of every notable family seated in Suffolk before the era of the Georges, together with abstracts of some, at any rate, of the wills and other evidences upon which these pedigrees are based. It is not pretended that these genealogies are exhaustive or absolutely free from error, but they have been put together, with infinite pains, after years of preliminary research. For, before a line of them had been printed, some twenty thousand of the Suffolk wills at Bury, Ipswich, Norwich, Lambeth, and Somerset House had been noted in abstract and elaborately indexed; the Suffolk pedigrees in the Heralds' Visitations, and the Harleian and other Manuscripts had been copied and collated; the leading features of vast numbers of Suffolk Chancery Proceedings, chiefly of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, had been jotted down in the form of brief summaries; whilst the gossiping collections of local antiquaries of the Stuart period, such as Ryece, D'Ewes, Candler, and Blois, had been studied and in part transcribed for future use. It need scarcely be added that the folios of Davy and the Jermyn MSS. in the British Museum have been largely drawn upon in the compilation of the present Volume.
A full description of the various Manuscripts and Records bearing upon Suffolk Family History will be found in a paper by the Editor of this work in the East Anglian, New Series, Vol. IV, p. 17.
That paper was published a few years before the first instalment of
Suffolk Manorial Families appeared in 1894, by which time enough subscribers had come forward to make it financially viable. Nine more parts followed from 1894 to 1900, when
Volume 1 was completed and indexed. The ten constituent parts of
Volume 2 were issued between 1902 and 1908. Only one part of
Volume 3 was ready by 1910, when Muskett sadly died, leaving his friend
Frederic Johnson (1864-1930), a professional genealogist, to produce two more.
Part 2 was issued in 1914, three years after Part 3, for which "
the matter was in a more forward state" as early as 1911. But not until 2021 did David Sherlock compile his
index to Volume 3 for the Suffolk Records Society.
The attached obituary and photograph of J. J. Muskett came from Google's page 80 at the front of Part 3 of
Volume 3. A similar copy obscures page 5 in Part 1 of Volume 3 at the
Internet Archive.
David Gobbitt
