Troy Town Stories

It is not known why John and Esther moved to Chatham. Unlike Canterbury , Chatham did not have a Huguenot community in the late seventeenth century.  A new European war, the War of the Spanish Succession , broke out in 1701. John possibly saw opportunities in Chatham, with the expanding royal dockyard.   Chatham Dockyard c.1700-1710 John was buried at St Mary's Chatham on 23 November 1740. His age at death is not known. As he was married in 1696, it is likely that he was around seventy.  Going by his will and the entry in the burial register, he had by this time settled on the spelling Cazeneuve.  In his will, made in 1735, John Cazeneuve describes himself as a distiller. The will shows that he was a man of property.  He had money invested in the South Sea Company; each of his four grandchildren was to receive £80 paid out of his South Sea annuities on reaching the age of twenty-one. One of the provisions of the Treaty of Utrecht at the conclusion of the Wa...

Searching for Cazeneuves on family history sites or in archive indexes is not easy; the name is spelled in various ways, and often transcribed or indexed wrongly. In transcriptions of various baptism records, for example, it is Cassanave, Caronensur or Cozensu. Wher e it is possible to check the original record, it seems that the spelling Cazeneufre or Cazeneufue was the one preferred in the family's early days in England.  The earliest mention of the family in England appears to be in 1696, when a licence for the marriage of John Cazeneufre and Esther Brodu was issued by the Vicar General. It is not known where or when this marriage took place.  A daughter of John and Esther, Marie Ester, was baptised in 1696. Two places of baptism appear in indexes - Westminster and Stepney. A son, Jean, was baptised in Spitalfields in 1698. Spitalfields was where many Huguenots chose to settle, many of them in the silkweaving trade, but John and Esther did not remain there long. Another son...