The following is an unproven hypothesis for the origin of most of the Tattersfield branches. Details are shown in CHARTS 16 and 15a.
Tattersfield is a rare surname, found only in Dewsbury, Yorkshire up to about 1800. Around that time the surname also appeared in Heckmondwike, York, Hull, London, Leeds and Lancashire. There are descendants living from the above six families. The Heckmondwike family is much the largest.
In 2019 a Y-DNA Project was undertaken, described above. It involved 3 participants, all known to be from the Heckmondwike group, plus one from each of the other five. The results showed that the three from the Heckmondwike group match each other at Genetic Distance 1-2, but do not match participants from the other five groups, nor do they match participants from other projects, with surname Tattersall.
Participants from the five smaller families all match each other at GD0-4, and Tattersalls at GD0-4.
The earliest recorded Tattersfield anywhere was Thomas, who married in Dewsbury Church in 1686. The next record is of Christopher Tattersfield, who married in Dewsbury Church in 1712. He might have been a son of Thomas, but there is no proof. After that there is a continuous record of Tattersfields in Dewsbury and Heckmondwike to the present, forming the Heckmondwike family.
(There are about 5 records from the London area around 1730, not yet connected to any others.)
Records from four of the five smaller families have been traced back, with reasonable certainty, to marriages in Dewsbury Church, as follows.
| Chart | Location | Head of Chart | Married | Where Married |
| 5 | York | Thomas Tattersfield | 1770 | Dewsbury Church |
| 6 | Hull | David Tattersfield | 1792 | Dewsbury Church |
| 7 | London | John Tattersfield | 1772 | Holborn, London |
| 8 | Leeds | Samuel Tattersfield | 1786 | Dewsbury Church |
| 9 | Lancashire | James Tattersfield | 1788 | Dewsbury Church |
These first records are all Marriages, which could by law be celebrated in Anglican churches, but not in Non-Conformist chapels, who could only carry out Baptisms and Burials. The total absence of earlier Tattersfield records might be attributed to:
- The records are missing or not published. The absence of baptism records for the above 5, might be explained if they were Non-Conformists, and the chapel records have not survived.This would not, however, explain the absence of Parish marriage records for their parents and earlier generations.
- The name was a variant of another, older, surname. The DNA match for the five smaller families suggests that they might well be descended from Tattersal. Moreover, there are many examples to the west of Dewsbury, of the same individual fairly obviously being called Tattersal(l) and Tattersfield in different documents, and occasionally in the same one. This possibility is examined below, in Tattersall-Tattersfield Descent?
Header Image: The marriage banns and Marriage Certificate of James T. and Maria Bedford exemplify flexible surname usage in the 18th Century. In this document, the vicar writes James Tattersal, but James signs as Tattersfield. Twenty year later, Maria was buried in Mirfield as the “wife of James Tattersall”. They had a daughter, baptised as Joanna Tattersfield in 1780, yet married as Joanna Tattersal in 1799. She married Michael Drake and had 11 children, of whom the second, Betty Drake, eventually married Mark Lives. They were to have 5 children, the second being named Josiah Tattersfield Lives (1827-1865). Parish record.