What genealogy will your children and grandchildren do if you have finished it all?

In a blog post I read the other day by Lorine McGinnis Schulze in the Legacy News she made a comment I found intriguing, “… I often feel bad that I'm doing so much that I'm not leaving my grandchildren the fun of the hunt!”

This, of course, assumes your children and/or grandchildren will be interested in the subject at all.

It seems almost everyone involved in family history societies these days is worried about what is going to happen to their group in the future, as old members decide they can no longer participate, or die off.

Recently, as the Editor of Relatively Speaking (the quarterly journal of the Alberta Genealogical Society), I have been involved in putting together an issue that had the theme of Youth and Genealogy. I had the pleasure of sourcing and now publishing articles from many authors who had a myriad of ideas about how to interest young people in family history. We even had three stories written by 11-year olds on research they did for a school project. It was all quite eye-opening although what the future holds for the AGS and other similar associations may still be up in the air.

Anyway, I thought about Lorine’s comment and came up with the following ideas:

1.      Family lines expand as each generation matures and gets married. For their children there are now two more lines in the family to learn about and, judging by the number of people active in family history research now, it is probable that many of the new branches will not have been studied.

In my own family, my aunt did an amazing job putting together information about my mother’s side but it was left to me to dig into my father’s ancestors.

2.      More data is continuing to be made available, especially on the Internet. We have only made a start in seeing important documents digitized so it is more than likely that there will continue to be a great deal of “new” information for our children and their children to look at and add to their family history library. As much as I have done in genealogy, I know there is still a great deal more to research – every month, it seems I find something new.

3.      As genealogical research expands, there are more and more groups of people getting together to do joint projects. This is partly because there is so much information to wade through but it is a direct result in so many more people being able to reach out to each other directly and almost immediately through social media.

4.      Anyone who thinks they have not made mistakes in their family trees needs to think again. As confident as I am in my work, my grandchildren might well find some additional information that will disprove some of my ideas. Judging by some of Lorine’s descriptions in her blog piece mentioned above, there could be many current genealogists whose work might be questioned by their descendants.

I am not worried that I will have found everything there is to find on my family. I am more concerned with who will take charge of all my books and files when I am gone, to preserve my years of work as well as that of my aunt and all the cousins who have helped out with their own data.

Wayne Shepheard is a volunteer with the Online Parish Clerk program in England, handling four parishes in Devon, England. He has published a number of articles about various aspects of genealogy and is the Editor of Relatively Speaking, the quarterly journal of the Alberta Genealogical Society. Wayne also provides genealogical consulting services through his business, Family History Facilitated

Witches in Devon, England and other haunting things

As we near Halloween we are reminded (bombarded might be a better term) of ghouls and assorted other haunting spectres. For we whose families come from Devon, England, what better way to mark the date than looking at the history of witches who may have lived there.

There is a notorious case of a witch trial in the town of Bideford, Devon. Three women were convicted in 1682: Temperance Lloyd, Mary Trembles and Susannah Edwards. They were hanged in Exeter in 1685, apparently the last of those convicted of witchcraft in England to have been executed.

There is a plaque at at Rougemont Castle, in Exeter, Devon commemorating the deaths of the three women with a plea to end such persecution. In recent years many groups, including a Devon MP, have sought to have the Bideford women pardoned. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/british-witches-demand-justice-for-the-bideford-three-executed-300-years-ago-9702695.html

 http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-devon-22840560

There is a website that list the people tried for witchcraft of which 22 were from Devon, England. (http://www.witchtrials.co.uk/county.html) I have not looked for them in other records so cannot confirm whether they were all convicted or hanged, outside of the three above:

1652    Joan Baker

1654    Diana Crosse

1658    Joan Furnace

1658    Thomas Harvey          

1670    Elizabeth Eburye

1670    Aliena Walter

1671    Johanna Elford

1671    Margaret Heddon

1672    Phelippa Bruen

1676    Susannah Daye

1682    Susanna Edwards

1682    Temperance Lloyd

1682    Mary Trembles

1684    Alicia Molland

1685    Agnes Ryder

1685    Jane Vallet

1687    Abigail Handford

1693    Dorothy Case

1693    Katherine Williams

1694    Clara Roach

1696    Elizabeth Horner        

1701    Susanna Hanover

Witchcraft is an interesting study and there have been many publications on the subject, for Europe and North America. You only have to do a Google search for “witches in Devon, England” to get thousands of references. A booklet about the Bideford trial by Frank Gent can be found at http://gent.org.uk/bidefordwitches/tbw.pdf There is a Museum of Witchcraft in Boscasle, Cornwall that apparently has a great collection of related artefacts. http://www.museumofwitchcraft.com/

Devon has its share of haunted places as well, ten of the (apparently) most important of which are described here: http://www.westernmorningnews.co.uk/10-haunted-places-Devon/story-23344331-detail/story.html I am sure there are many more!

One that is not listed is a pub in Underwood, Plympton called the Union Inn (http://www.unioninnplympton.com/). This pub has been in existence since the early 1600s.

 

Photo from Union Inn Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/Union-Inn-160924193926387/

According to the pub-owner, there is a well-dressed lady from long ago that has visited the established on more than a few occasions, usually late at night. She did not appear the day we were there in 2004 so we could not confirm the story.

 

Wayne enjoying a brew at the Union Inn in 2004

Wayne Shepheard is a volunteer with the Online Parish Clerk program in England, handling four parishes in Devon, England. He has published a number of articles about various aspects of genealogy and is the Editor of Relatively Speaking, the quarterly journal of the Alberta Genealogical Society. Wayne also provides genealogical consulting services through his business, Family History Facilitated

How could I tell which Amy was which?

As we go further back into English records we have to depend largely on parish baptism, marriage and burial registers to tell us who is who. But, of course, because of traditional naming patterns, children in related families often had the same forenames. So how do you tell which one is which in later documents.

I recently ran across this case in reviewing a cousin’s family tree on Ancestry. We don’t yet know what our exact relationship is but know we are related through an Amy Shepheard born in the late 18^th century in Cornwood, Devon. She was his 4^th great-grandmother and my 4^th great-grandaunt.

Cousin Douglas has his Amy as the daughter of Nicholas and Mary (Barratt) Shepheard, baptized on 10 July 1767. I have her as the daughter of Richard and Mary (Collins) Shepheard, baptized on 29 December 1765. Both were baptized in Cornwood. Both Nicholas and Richard were brothers, and named their daughters after their mother, Amy (Prideaux) Shepheard.

Sons of Nicholas Shepheard & Amy Prideaux
Children of Nicholas Shepheard & Mary Barratt	Children of Richard Shepheard & Mary Collins
Nicholas (1761-1820)	Richard (1762-1794)
William (1763-1796	Amy (1765-1826)
Mary (1765-1766)	John (1768-1845)
Amy (1767-1788)	Priscilla (1770-1850)
Jane Treby (1769-1851)	Thomas (1771-1834)
Sampson (1771-1856)	Elizabeth (1774-1851)
Arthur (1773-1834)	James (1776-1841)
Thomasine (1775-1846)

Douglas descends from the Amy Shepheard that married Phillip Chapple in Cornwood in 1789. She would have been 24, arguably a bit old for marriage at the time. The other Amy married Joseph Hillson, also in Cornwood, in 1787 at the age of 20. It would be easy to confuse the two, being so close in age and given their respective ages in regard to the marriage dates. Both would have been 22 if the marriages happened the other way around.

Anyway, I believe it was Richard's daughter that married Phillip Chapple, not Nicholas’. One reason I thought that is because one of the witnesses to that marriage was John Shepheard. A witness to the marriage of Amy Shepheard to Joseph Hillson was William Shepheard. The first Amy had a brother named John, but no brother named William; the second one had a brother named William, but no John. I think the names of the witnesses give us a solid clue as to their relationships. It would not be unreasonable for immediate family members to be witnesses to marriages. It is interesting that all of the individuals named in both marriages signed their names in the marriage register confirming the spelling of our surname. I wrote about that in a post on May 13, 2014.

The clincher for me, though, was a series of property documents signed in 1813 concerning a piece of land in a nearby parish. One of the sons of Nicholas and Mary, Sampson, was to receive some land through his mother, following her death. His older brother, Nicholas, inherited the main estate of the family. In order for Sampson to take possession of the minor property, he had to pay his other, older living siblings 20 pounds each. Three sisters were named in the mother's final instructions that would receive the monies: Amy, Jane Treby and Thomasine. One older brother, William, and one sister, Mary, had died before their mother, so were not named in the document. As the older male, William would have been the one to get the lands if he had lived. Daughters, of course, could not inherit real property at the time but were generally compensated in some other way.

By the time the property was transferred, only two sisters were still living, Jane Treby and Thomasine. Each received 20 pounds in 1813. What defined Amy in this particular document was she was named as “afterwards Amy Hilson”. That proved that she was the one that married Joseph Hillson. The Amy that married Phillip Chapple was still alive at the time the document was executed, so she was not the daughter of Nicholas and Mary (Barratt) Shepheard. Amy Chapple died in Cornwood in 1826.

As an additional discovery in the whole process, the land documents also described how Mary Barratt had come to own the property. It was through a transfer of land from her step-father, Arthur Jefferys, to her mother, Thomasine. From learning Thomasine’s first name on this document, I was then able to find:

·         her marriage to William Barratt (in Newton Ferrers, Devon in 1736);

·         her second marriage to Arthur Jefferys (in Newton Ferrers, in 1754);

·         her maiden name (Goad);

·         the deaths of all three individuals (William in Yealmpton, Devon in 1740; Arthur in Ermington, Devon in 1765; Thomasine in Erminton in 1771); and

·         the baptism dates and places of her two daughters, Mary and Jane (both in Newton Ferrers).

Unfortunately, Cousin Douglas also has the parentage of Mary Barratt wrong on his Ancestry tree, showing them as John and Elizabeth Barrett of Cornwood. I actually had the same idea until I found the property document.  It was quite by serendipity that I found the property record that contained a great deal of family history information, which just shows one always needs to keep reviewing every kind of record possible.

All images used here courtesy of the Plymouth and West Devon Record Office. Wayne Shepheard is a volunteer with the Online Parish Clerk program in England, handling four parishes in Devon, England. He has published a number of articles about various aspects of genealogy and is the Editor of Relatively Speaking, the quarterly journal of the Alberta Genealogical Society. Wayne also provides genealogical consulting services through his business, Family History Facilitated