Papers relating to property and estates

This material consists of a range of title deeds and associated papers including wills, settlements, manorial records, plans, enclosure papers and accounts relating to properties and estates owned by members of the Galton family for both private and business purposes, and by families connected to them by marriage, including the Alloway, Button, Douglas, Abrahams and Farmer families, in Warwickshire, Worcestershire, Staffordshire, Somerset, Cornwall and Devon. Some of these records dates from the medieval period, but the majority date from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries. These papers provide evidence of the family's origins in Somerset, the expansion of their properties and estates in Warwickshire and Staffordshire dating from the mid eighteenth century when Samuel Galton moved to Birmingham, the acquisition of further properties in Somerset by Samuel Galton junior, and of country estates in Worcestershire by his sons Hubert John Barclay Galton and John Howard Galton. A chronological overview of such acquisitions reflects the family's growing wealth and status in society during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Arranged by county, and within county by place, beginning with counties in the West Midlands area. Groups of papers relating to a particular place have been arranged in roughly chronological order. Cross references have been provided where documents described in one section of this series also make reference to pieces of property described in another section. Deeds have largely been kept in the bundles they were in when a draft list was produced for this collection. Bundles have only been split or reconstituted where it is absolutely certain that deeds were out of place, or that they filled gaps in another bundle.