Thomas de Trafford

Sir Thomas Joseph de Trafford, 1st Baronet, DL (22 March 1778 – 10 November 1852) was a member of a prominent family of English Roman Catholics.

By 12 November 1819, he is recorded as selling the advowson of the parish of St Bartholomew's Church, Wilmslow, to Edward Vigor Fox for £6,000.

However, in this case it appears that Trafford and Fox drew up the sale after they learned that Joseph Bradshaw, the incumbent, was close to death.

Fox's subsequent nomination of George Uppleby as rector, on 30 December 1819, was contested by the Bishop of Chester, and the case wound through the courts during the 1820s.

In Edward Twycross's The Mansions of England and Wales (1847), Thomas is noted as the owner of Trafford Hall in the parish of Eccles on the southern bank of the Irwell, 5 miles (8.0 km) west of Manchester.

[7] Tithe maps from the mid-19th century show that Thomas owned more than 700 plots in the Bollin valley near Wilmslow, amounting to about 430 acres (1.7 km2).

[11] Thomas Trafford was commissioned as a Captain in the Third Battalion of the Royal Lancashire Militia on 6 March 1801, towards the end of Britain's involvement in the French Revolutionary Wars.

On 16 August 1819, Major Trafford was sent a note by a magistrate, local coalowner William Hulton, urging him to dispatch the cavalry regiment to a public meeting being addressed by the orator Henry Hunt.

"[17] The anglicisation to Trafford had probably occurred in the 15th century, when the Norman article "de", signifying that a family originated from a particular place, was generally dropped in England.

The resumption of such older versions of family names was a romantic trend in 19th-century England, encouraged by a mistaken belief that the article "de" indicated nobility.