The following chart contains the descendants of William Riches (c.1705-before 1771), of St Mary, Long Stratton, Co Norfolk. Because transcriptions of the pre-1730 parish records for Stratton are not available, indeed are not available for almost every parish in the Depwade district, it is currently impossible to trace William's ancestry (or even his marriage). In the course of this research, I examined all Riches from across the Depwade district and also the neighbouring parishes and this research can be found via the link above.

It is likely that William & Mary had additional children given the gaps between the known children (6 years, 5 years, 1 year, 7 years), however no trace of them has been found. It is possible William named a son after himself. Whilst I have not found the baptism for Robert, born c.1743, he was born in Long Stratton and William & Mary were the only Riches known to have been there at the time. At this stage Mary & Robert are the only children known to have survived childhood.

Tasburgh is a civil parish and village. The River Tas flows nearby and Tasburgh Hall lies to the west of the village. The last part of the name 'Tasburgh' comes from the Old English word 'burh', meaning a defended place. The prefix 'Tas' may have derived from an ancient personal name (and the river named after the village). Alternatively the river name came first, 'tas' or 'taes' being held to be the Celtic word for water in general which also appears, for example, in the name of the River Tees. A large hill fort abuts the village at the northwest, and the village church is built within it. The fort dates back to the Iron Age. The area was first settled and the surrounding lands cultivated prior to 25000BC. Traces of Mesolithic hunter bands (8500-4500BC) have been found in the Tasburgh area. The hill was also the site of a Roman settlement known as Ad Taum. The Roman site carries great interest, being in the land of the Iceni, from whence came Boudicea.  In Roman times, the field opposite the church was occupied by Roman soldiers, guarding or policing the road linking Camulodunum (Colchester) and Vicenorum (Caistor St Edmund), now the A140. There was a further Roman camp where the 3 streams meet to form the River Tas. Traces of at least three Roman farmhouses have been found in Tasburgh. By 627AD East Anglia had a Christian king and may have stood on the site of the present building. At the place where the Roman road crossed the marshes of the Hempnall stream the embankment had worn away, leaving a miry morass aptly named Deepwade. This muddy obstacle and its name almost certainly originated in Saxon times when the local administrative area which included Tasburgh was called Depwade Hundred. In the Domesday Book the village was named Taseburc and its dimensions are given as ten by seven furlongs, there was a watermill and the land was ploughed by five, eight-ox teams. Two hundred and thirty-one acres of arable land are recorded together with eighteen acres of meadowland. At the time the village was centred around the church. The archaeological evidence shows that from around 1100AD activity there declined until a hundred years later the church stood completely isolated. The village had transferred piecemeal to the valley below, its dwellings scattered around the edges of small greens. Before 1800 most of the houses in the village were timber framed but a growing shortage of wood, starting in the previous century, had led to the larger houses being built in brick with tiled, rather than thatched, roofs. From the early 19th century smaller houses followed suit and early brick buildings can be seen on Low Road, all built between 1818 and 1840. Other houses and farm buildings of these times were of clay lump construction. By 1851 the population of 363 at the beginning of the century had grown to 475 and the village contained 113 houses. This growth reflected the boom in agriculture in the mid 19th century. At this time Tasburgh was quite self-contained with two blacksmiths, two shopkeepers, two butchers, a shoemaker, a wheelwright, a miller and a maltster. There were eleven farmers, a cattle dealer and a pig jobber who slaughtered the pigs that most of the villagers kept. There were five licensed premises and a windmill in addition to the watermill. Later the uncertainties of wind and water power were overcome by the installation of a steam engine at the watermill. At this time the village comprised two separate straggles of houses, one along Saxlingham Lane and Low Road and the other clustered around Ipswich Road (the old Roman road). An agricultural depression in the last part of the 19th century caused the population to fall as low as 368. The local church is dedicated to St. Mary the Virgin and was probably built around 1050, a traditional Norfolk Saxon church of flint with a round tower. It is thought that the original ancient church was destroyed by the Danes and rebuilt by King Cnut. Of this original rebuild, only the tower and parts of the West wall remain. The round Saxon tower is a distinctive Norfolk feature, probably being round because square corners are hard to achieve satisfactorily with flint. The church today sits some distance away from the village. The church was largely rebuilt in the late 15th century and then again substantially renovated in the 19th.[Wikipedia, GenUKI, Tasvalley, Tasburgh, Norfolk Churches]

St Peter Parmentergate, Norwich. The name seems to be originally from St Peter Per Mountergate (a nearby street). The original building, probably small and in the Norman style, dates from the late eleventh century. In the fifteenth century it was completely rebuilt, financed by the prosperity of its location on a main route through the city, close to the merchants' quays. St Peter Parmentergate became redundant in 1981. The church, built on a slope, is notable for its great height.[Norwich Churches] St Julian, Norwich. The building as it now stands dates almost entirely from 1953, when it was rebuilt after suffering a direct hit from a bomb in 1942. There is good reason to believe that a church has stood here since Anglo-Saxon times, although whether the destroyed building was of Saxon date, or Saxon workmanship but post-1066, is difficult to decide. The north wall of the nave is original, and repairs after the bombing revealed a number of circular windows, (oculi) quite high up – a standard method of lighting Anglo-Saxon churches. The tower, one of four round towers in Norwich, took the hit, and collapsed across the body of the church. It was partly rebuilt.[Norwich Churches] The church of St Martin at Palace is one of the oldest in Norwich. It stands close to a stretch of the riverbank where, on the site of the present Law Courts, traces of some of the earliest settlement have been found. The church is referred to in the Domesday Book (1086) and excavations made during the conversion of the church in the 1980s revealed foundations of a Norman church as well as evidence of one, if not two, earlier Anglo-Saxon timber churches. The Norman Bishop's Palace and the remains of a Norman house (beneath the Law Courts) are testimony to the high status of this part of the City at that time. The present building dates from the 15th century, though it is much overlaid by Victorian work. In 1783 a large part of the tower fell and it was not until 1874 that the two upper stages were rebuilt and the lower part refaced. In 1851 the North Chancel Aisle and most of the Chancel itself collapsed. They were rebuilt in 1853-1854, when a thorough 'restoration' was undertaken.[Norwich Churches]

Alburgh, pronounced locally Ar-brer, a village in southern Norfolk, had a population of 589 in 1841, covering an area of 1514 acres. In 1851 the population was 575 & in 1881 there were 602 residents in the parish. It is locatged in the Norfolk end of the Waveney Valley. "Here .. were .. rolling, secretive meadows, the copses that seeped and spread between the fields, the quiet, scattered parishes with mere hints of village centres. Introspective hamlets, not talking to each other, the narrow lanes that connected them veering and dipping as if trying to shake them off. No commuters here, no holiday cottages or weekend homes. Everyone except me was here because they had to be. This was where they lived, where they worked; they were the modern equivalents of the blacksmith, the carter, the wheelwright. The Waveney valley is the heart of rural East Anglia, perhaps the last truly insular place in the south-east of England ... looking across the country at the scattered village and its setting. Beyond the houses was the ancient field pattern, the beech trees on the ridge and the rooks wheeling above them." The parish church, All Saints, has a tall, square tower. The church was restored in 1876, several additions were made at the same time. All Saint's tower is massive - even though the church is on the small side, the tower is clearly visible from Denton on the other side of the valley. The bulk of the tower is probably 14th century, but the top of the tower collapsed in 1895, and what we see at the top now dates from that time. The west front must have been rather grand once, with massive niches flanking the window, but the canopies of the niches have gone, either vandalised by protestants or simply worn away by the passing of the centuries.[GenUKI, Norfolk Churches]

The village of Hempnall is a large scattered village in the north-east corner of the Hundred of Depwade in south Norfolk, about ten miles south of Norwich, at the source of the River Tas. A large number of artifacts have been discovered representing human activity from almost every period of history from the Neolithic age to the present. It was once a centre of commerce, holding a weekly market and annual fairs. In the past, the village was principally an agrarian community. Situated within the wood-pasture area of south Norfolk, the land favoured mixed farming. There were many woodland related trades and most old houses are timber-framed, many given a brick skin in the eighteenth century. There was never a residential lord of the manor or influential landowner to dominate the village. Spinning and weaving were once important but by the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the villagers had diversified so that there was a multiplicity of trades and small shops. Ten inns, taverns or beer houses are recorded. Covering 3583 acres, the population in 1841 was 1255, making it both larger and more populous than most of its neighbouring parishes. By 1881 the population had dropped to 881. In 1854, an ancient British (Celtic) cemetery was discovered in a field to the east of Hempnall, containing a quantity of cinerary urns, burnt bones, and ashes, some of which appear to have been Anglo-Roman, others predating the Roman period. The parish church, dedicated to St Margaret, is a large structure with a square tower. It was partially rebuilt and thoroughly restored in 1857. The church is said to have been almost entirely destroyed by fire at some remote period, and was again burnt down before 1550AD.[Halsgrove Pub., GenUKI] Fritton is a village in southern Norfolk, scattered around a village green of 66 acres. In 1841 the parish had 301 residents and covered 850 acres. In 1881 the population had dropped to 204 (and the area given as 890 acres). The parish church, which is dedicated to St. Catherine, has a round tower and three bells. The church was restored in 1853 however unlike many of its neighbours, it was not rebuilt or restored in the late medieval period, and so retains its wall-paintings, as well as other medieval fixtures and fittings. The church today is surrounded by fields.[GenUKI, Norfolk Churches]

Saxlingham-Thorpe is a parish and village about 7.5 miles south of Norwich in the south of the Henstead district, borderng on the Depwade district. In 1841 the parish had a population of 131 and covered 456 acres. By 1851 the statistics were 148 residents and 449 acres. The parish church was dedicated to St Mary, but was abandoned before 1740 when the parish was consolidated with that of the neighbouring parish of Saxlingham-Nethergate. St Mary's is now an ivy-clad ruin, with little left standing.[GenUKI]

The location of Tasburgh Road, Tharston is uncertain. The road does not exist by that name today, if it exists at all. There are several references in the 1800's to a Tasburgh Road, but confusingly in several locations. The present day Tasburgh Road is the northern end of Saxlingham Lane, lying in Saxlingham Thorpe. The southern end of Tasburgh Rd/Saxlingham Lane terminates just outside Tasburgh. This Tasburgh Road cannot, by any twist of geography, be imagined to lie in Tharston. The old Queens Head Inn is now located on Bungay Road, Tharston. In 1891 the location of the Queen's Head was given as Low Common, Tasburgh Road, Tharston (also as Mill Road at other times). Bungay Road today runs east from Tharston to Topcroft. The Queen's Head was rebuilt in the 1930's and closed in 1985.[Norfolk Pubs] All Saints is one of four original churches in the parish of Shotesham and one of the two surviving churches. It is located in what was known as High Shotesham, the village centre, as distinct from Low Shotesham, which included the even more rural farming parts of the parish. The two roads that leave Norwich to the south head towards Ipswich and Bungay, and as they get further apart a hidden valley unfolds between them, a valley of tiny lanes and high hedges and lost little villages, a rural heartland barely a hundred miles from the centre of London. Shotesham, pronounced shot-s'm, is one of the villages in this lost valley. The large windows in the nave and the Perpendicular tower make the church look newer than it is, although the nave has the proportions of a much earlier building. All Saints’ stands on a prominent site overlooking a tributary of the river Tas flowing through Shotesham’s extensive common. Its dedication suggests a Saxon origin though the nave was given perpendicular windows and the chancel extended in the fourteenth century.[Norfolk Churches, TasValley]