I have spent the last six weeks at home on maternity leave really getting down to the Cumbrian Sauls and have produced 46 charts which still do not cover the county. Geographically, these fall into three groups, the first covering Holme Cultram (a coastal parish North‑West of Wigton), the adjacent parish of Bromfield and Carlisle, the second St. Bees (a coastal parish next to Whitehaven out of which the three Whitehaven parishes were carved), the three Whitehaven parishes themselves and the nearby parish of Lamplugh, and the third the market town of Keswick, surprisingly not an ancient parish but included in the huge lakeland parish of Crossthwaite.

The work to date shows that the earliest Saul families came from the north of the county in Holme Cultram, on the Solway Firth where Robert and Jeffery Saule, possibly brothers, had children baptised in the 1580s and 1590s. These are by far the earliest incidence of Sauls in the Cumbrian IGI. They do not start appearing in other parishes until the 1700s. The Joseph Saul who was ancestor of the Lamplugh Sauls and their offshoot, one of the Whitehaven branches, from which Glenda Manwaring's Australian branch descends, was probably the Joseph who was baptised in Holme Cultram in 1724.

Accounts of several interesting Saul families have been found in the book Cumberland Families and Heraldry by C. Roy Hudleston and R.S. Boumphrey, published in 1978 by the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society. (extra series vol.23, 1978) which consists of short family histories arranged alphabetically by surname. Silas Saul (1762‑1844) founded a firm of solicitors Saul and Lightfoot in Castle Street, Carlisle. I intend to write to them as they were certainly in Carlisle in 1977. According to Hudleston and Boumphrey, Silas's ancestor was a John Saul who was born in 1698, but I do not have any record of this either in the IGI or the other material I hold. Nor does the IGI give Silas's baptism, but it does show his marriage to Jane Jackson at Rockcliffe in 1793 and the subsequent baptism of eight children in Carlisle between 1799 and 1815. Three of Silas's sons entered the family business: George (1797‑1853), a JP and Under‑Sheriff, Silas (1811‑ 1878) and John (1815‑1868). A JP, John had residences at Pinnshill, Stanwix and Kirklinton Hall in Cumberland, and St. Albans House in Brighton, Sussex. He assumed the additional surname of Kirklinton, with his son George dropping the name of Saul altogether, a change of name notified in The Times of 5th January 1877. The family had a coat of arms which appears on their monuments in Kirklinton Church and on their bookplates.

Another notable Cumbrian Saul was Joseph Saul who died 1842. He became headmaster of the "famous" (according to Hudleston and Boumphry) Green Row Academy in Low Holme, a township in Holme Cultram parish. He was succeeded as head by his son Hugh, who was father of Alfred Tindall Saul (born 1879), a solicitor of Highcroft, Carlisle. Confusingly, there is another, seemingly separate, family of Sauls where the name Tindale figures as a Christian name and the name Hugh features in two generations. This commences with Hugh Saul marrying Martha Tindale at Holme Cultram in 1801. Maybe future research will reveal a connection.

Lastly, a new committee member elected at the last AGM. John Slaughter, has taken over as sub‑co‑ordinator for the Norfolk Sauls and has continued the chart work from the IGI for Mundesley (a coastal parish not all that far from Cromer) and nearby parishes, so we now have twelve Norfolk SAUL charts on file.

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