About — Isham of Pytchley

Isham of Pytchley is a documentary genealogy of the Isham family of Pytchley, Northamptonshire. It begins with Robert de Isham, living between about 1256 and 1272, and follows his descendants who bore the surname Isham or one of its variants (Isam, Isom, Isome, Isum, Issum, Esom, Esham, Ysham) through 16 generations, from the Northamptonshire eyre rolls to colonial Virginia and New England. The Explorer carries the male line further, through 19 generations.

The family

The Ishams take their name from Isham, a village near Kettering, and were freeholders at nearby Pytchley by the end of the thirteenth century. The earliest proof of the line is a Northamptonshire eyre roll of 1293–94 that names “Robert son of Robert de Isham” among the defendants in a dispute over tenements in Pytchley. For the next two centuries the family appear in the plea rolls of the Common Pleas and King’s Bench as landholders, attorneys, creditors and county officials, their affairs recorded in suits, fines, inquisitions and wills. Robert Isham (d. about 1475) served as a magistrate and royal administrator. His younger sons founded branches at Clipston and Coventry, and one became a prebendary of Lincoln.

In the early sixteenth century Euseby Isham of Ringstead (1486–1546) raised a large family whose sons divided the inheritance and carried the name into new places. Giles, the heir, kept Pytchley. Gregory settled at Braunston, and his son Sir Euseby Isham, high sheriff in 1584 and knighted in 1603, built the great house at Pytchley. John and Henry made their fortunes as mercers of London. John bought Lamport, and his grandson Sir John Isham was created a baronet. The Ishams of Lamport Hall carried the title through the following centuries. Henry’s sons founded the line of Barby, Northamptonshire, and its offshoots in Warwickshire, Leicestershire and London.

Two branches crossed the Atlantic. Captain Henry Isham, of the Northamptonshire family, settled at Bermuda Hundred on the James River in Virginia about 1656. His daughter Mary married William Randolph of Turkey Island, and through their son Isham Randolph she was grandmother of Jane Randolph, mother of Thomas Jefferson. In New England, John Isham of Barnstable, Massachusetts (d. 1713), whose origin is still unproved, founded the family from which most Ishams of New England descend. His grandchildren spread to Martha’s Vineyard and Connecticut. One proposal places his birth at Walton in Kimcote, Leicestershire, where a John Isum was baptised in 1666.

Not every bearer of the name descends from Robert de Isham in the male line. The Isomes of Cheshunt, Hertfordshire, and Green’s Norton, Northamptonshire, carry the surname through Apollonya Isham, daughter of Henry the London mercer: Y-DNA tests of a male-line descendant place them in the Cleborne patriline. The person pages say where a descent rests on records, and where it is only proposed.

The edition

The edition holds 153 persons and 1137 sources, of which 397 are original records or calendars of records dated between 1276 and 1705. Of the persons, 119 have a written account of their life. Every statement in an account should be traceable to a source you can open from the same page.

Descent: the tree of the family from Robert de Isham. Roman numerals give the generation, and the figures in the margin count the sources attached to each person.
Explorer: the male line drawn as a chart you can pan, zoom and walk with the arrow keys. It goes further than the rest of the site: 1,478 people (792 men and their daughters) over 19 generations, against 153 people over 16 generations here. A dot marks those who have a page on this site; for everyone else the chart gives the name, dates and a link to the FamilySearch record.
Sources: every source in the edition, which you can filter by words, kind and archive series, and sort by any column.
Person pages: a life, the family, and the records, as described below.

Relatives who are not yet edited here are shown in grey italic with a FamilySearch tag, which opens their record on the FamilySearch Family Tree in a new tab.

How the pages are made

The family is compiled first on the FamilySearch Family Tree, with the records attached there and the life sketches written there, so that corrections are made once and shared. The site is then built from a saved snapshot of that work. It does not read from FamilySearch while you browse it, and it changes only when it is rebuilt.

Where a person has a life sketch, it is shown under Life. Superscript numbers link each statement to the attached source that supports it, and a ^? marks a statement for which no attached source has yet been found. The footnotes were matched by machine against the source summaries and are a guide, not a verification. Where the tree has no sketch, the account of the family in Northamptonshire Families is quoted if it covers the person. Failing both, an Entry is generated from the recorded facts in the compressed style of the printed pedigrees: parentage, birth, offices, marriages, death and burial, then issue grouped by mother.

The Records are the sources attached to that person. For plea rolls and similar records the text shown is an English summary followed by the machine transcription from Glyph Machina, made from the images of the rolls published by the Anglo-American Legal Tradition project. Machine transcriptions are uncorrected: read them against the image before relying on a name or a word.

Snapshot

This edition was built from data compiled on 6 November 2026.

Kinds of source

Record: an original document, such as a plea roll, foot of fine, eyre roll or will, identified by its TNA reference.
Calendar: a printed or online abstract of records, such as the Calendar of Patent Rolls or inquisitions post mortem.
Secondary: a history or compiled work, such as the Victoria County History or a baronetage.
Index: a database index entry, which points to a record rather than reproducing it.