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North Devon Darks

 

Dark is still not a very numerous surname in Britain today. The homeland of the name stretches from Devonshire, through the adjacent counties of Somerset and Gloucester as far as Worcestershire, in a crescent shaped arc along the line of the Bristol Channel and the River Severn that flows into it. Amongst this string of four counties the heaviest concentration, by far, is in Devonshire. There is not the slightest doubt that a very high proportion of Darks today are descended from the Devonshire Darks. Within Devon the name is concentrated in north and south-east Devon.

At least two of the current families advertising on this site are related to the North Devon Darks and the Darks of Parkham in particular. This is not surprising. Within North Devon the parish with the greatest number of Dark entries in its parish registers is the parish of Parkham, about 6 miles west of Bideford.

The family history of one line of the Darks of Parkham (under the title “Dark of Parkham”) has been written up in great detail. Additional background information on the distribution of the name in England and a collection of parish register entries (up to 1837) from across the “clan” territory of North Devon is included. This is a major study and occupies 176.6 MB of CD Rom space. Unfortunately this makes it impossibly expensive for the author to produce it as a printed work. Hitherto it has circulated amongst members of the immediate family and a handful of local and family historians in the form of a CD Rom disk.

I should be pleased to share the work with Dark descendants in North America as long as it is clearly understood:

  1. This is a family history which requires to be read as a whole and not simply mined for genealogical nuggets.
  2. It is my intellectual property and if use is made of it I would expect the appropriate acknowledgement to be made.
  3. It should not be exploited commercially.

Copies are available for a nominal charge of £10.

Arthur Dark

Snail mail address:
74, Breakspear Road South,
Ickenham,
Uxbridge,
Middlesex UB10 8HE
England.

Tel:01895 639168
E-Mail address: Arthur@dark.fslife.co.uk