With thanks to Neil WW Gilliat and Roy Walker for their dedication and hard  work in gathering details of the `Gilliat Family`. Thank you to other  members of the `Gilliat` family for their information and photographs. Please  have a look at the family tree and see if you have some information, comments  or corrections that need to be done, or even a photo to add.  Please contact me  as I would love to have as much information for this site for our future  generations. Please do not forget to sign the Guest Book.

I`m so pleased to have been able to put all this information onto the web for  all the `Gilliat` family to share and hopefully to add to. Thanks for looking  and sharing in my obsession! Carol.

Neil Gilliat Writes: The Gilliat name and derivatives of it show up on records  in England long before the Edict of Nantes & persecution of Protestants. 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 found 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  ten miles from Broughton. The birth of Janni Gilliat was registered by her  father Phillipe on the 26th January 1549 at St Olav Church in the City of  York. 
 However, some ten or fifteen years later the Gilliat name begins to show in  numbers in village church records of Northern Lincolnshire just south of the  Humber River. From 1561 to 1600 at least a dozen families appear in church  registers. This suggests that there was an influx, or 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. 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  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 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. It appears that the name generally ends up as Gilliat or  Gilliatt. I have our own branch of the family bible, a large book, dating 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.