The Story Behind My Site
Many thanks to Neil WW Gilliat and Roy Walker for all their hard work in gathering the family history together.

Neil Gilliat Writes:
Our forefathers were said to be Huguenots from France, Protestants who fled persecution and death at the hands of the Roman Catholic majority. Also they were thought to be tobacco merchants from France, a twisted fact that obviously came from the exploits of John and Thomas Gilliat in Virginia.

The Huguenots tradition was strong among many of the Gilliat factions although it has, to my knowledge, never been proven. There are a lot of items that do lend support to the claim such as the French Christian names of many of the oldest recorded births of Gilliats outside of the family. Guillaume was a fairly common name. Further the early Gilliats were unmistakably ardent Protestants.

The Gilliat name and derivatives of it, show up on the records in England at an early date and long before the Edict of Nantes and the persecution of the Protestants of France. Roy Walker quotes the record of John Gilliott as a witness to a deed at Wold Newton, Lincolnshire, in 1307. The earliest date I have picked up is the birth of Catherine Gilliott registered by her father Piers Gilliott in 1410 at Broughton, in Yorkshire. The same Catherine Gilliott seems to have been married to a Richard Tempest and had four children while living at Bracewell, Yorkshire some ten miles from Broughton. The birth of Janni Gilliat was registered by her father Phillipe on the 26th of January 1549. at the St. Olav Church in the City of York.

However, some ten or fifteen years later the Gilliat name begins to show in numbers in the village church records of Northern Lincolnshire just south of the Humber River. From 1561 to 1600 at least a dozen families appear in the church registers. This suggests that there was an influx, or in migration, of the Gilliats at that time. It could also have been the results of compulsory registration of births that was introduced about that time. This had been a practice mostly restricted to the well to do, and even then was some what haphazard. The Gilliat families spread throughout Lincolnshire and South Yorkshire over the next two hundred years and appeared to be tied mostly to the land in one way or another. The spelling of the Gilliat name in the records is of some interest, and varies between and even within the families, probably depending on the education of the vicar of the church. Different spellings of the surname were used when christening children within the same families. The use of Y instead of I was quite common and was an acceptable practice of the day. But mostly a name was spelled phonetically, as spoken by the client often distorted by a heavy accent or dialect, or as heard by the vicar who was often barely literate himself. It appears that the name generally ends up as Gilliat or Gilliatt. I have our own branch of the family bible, a large book, which dates back to the early 1800s. On the flyleaf are recorded births and deaths of our family. The use of Gilliat and Gilliatt is mingled throughout and the use of one or two ts seems of little or no consequence. It is observed that in William of Scrivelsby's branch of the family education was always an important priority and most, if not all the family members, were literate which was remarkable in the day.