Historical Society - Capel Family story
History Notes
This weekend is Market Day Saturday – another busy time just after the last weekend. Features of the market day will be much the same as usual although there is some speculation that a new feature may be added.
Next Sunday we are expecting a special visitor to come and have a chat with some of our members re family history and in a few weeks we may have another couple of visitors to the museum, possibly to the April markets. More information on this later.
This week I have been asked a family history question re the Capel family and it has led me back to the 16th century to try to prove where the roots of the family came from. This particular family are definitely English, in spite of a rumour, as they are recorded in the Domesday Book in 1086 and again in the 1087 version which shows them in Herefordshire on the River Wye. Later they moved to Gloucestershire. The whole story is in the Capel book which sadly is out of print.
The origin of the name Piedmont is also interesting. It seems to have come from the name of the original owner, pre 1840, who was F. Foote. After a few years and a few brief owners, the name became Piedmont or Foot’s Mountain by the time that Daniel Capel moved in, in the late 1840’s.
In the 1840’s there were just two properties in the Cobbadah Creek Valley and then the Cobbadah village grew up on the junction of Cobbadah Creek and Sheepstation Creek. There was a bridle track from Cobbadah along the creek to Piedmont and another track leading down to the Horton Valley passed Cobbadah Station, held from 1836 by the Eaton brothers and sold to the Crowley family who settled there about 1845.
Boundaries in those early days were usually the edge of watersheds as there were no fences and when cattle were mustered the strays were returned to their home valleys. Brands were mostly used for identification. There is a letter from a Drover taking cattle to the lower Hunter Valley for sale and it lists a number of brands as stock were collected into the mob from various stations for sale at Morpeth – a bit like a truck visiting a couple of properties these days to take various stock to the saleyards in Gunnedah or Tamworth.