Thomas Eesley

Thomas Eesley was born about 1700 at Banbury, Oxfordshire, and died 1 June 1750 at Oxford St Aldate, in the city of Oxford about twenty miles south of the family’s Banbury base. He was the husband of Sarah (her maiden name not yet recovered) and the father of at least two sons recorded at Banbury: Jethro (b. 1730) and William Eesley (1731–1777) — the William whose son Joseph begins the documented descent that runs through the miller John Eesley to the Eesleys who crossed to Canada, Michigan, and Ohio.

He sits at the top of the Banbury Eesley cluster whose baptisms fill the St Mary’s, Banbury register through the 1730s. Per the family’s FamilySearch tree his own father was Hugh Easley (b. 1675), with a mother Hannah — the earliest Eesley name the line reaches so far, though documented there only by name.

The record carries a small uncertainty worth flagging: the tree also hangs a baptism at Shoreditch, Middlesex (London), on 30 August 1710 on this same Thomas. A person cannot be both born about 1700 and baptized as an infant in 1710, and a London baptism has no corroboration in an otherwise firmly Banbury/Oxfordshire family — so this is most likely a different Thomas Easley (a common name) mis-attached from an index, or a conflation with a rounded-off “1700” estimate. Best treated as unproven until a source ties it to the Banbury family. (Both Thomas’s and his son William’s death/residence entries do point to Oxford St Aldate, so the family’s center may genuinely have shifted from Banbury toward the city of Oxford in the mid-eighteenth century before returning to the Banbury–Hanwell area by Joseph’s generation.)

Source: Dale Eesley / FamilySearch — Thomas Eesley (GN35-C53); St Mary’s, Banbury parish baptism register, 1730s (Oxfordshire Church of England Baptisms, 1538–1812).