Monday, February 6, 2023

A few more thoughts on the Siderfin Pedigree Chart

 I wonder if James Sanders had access to the Luxborough Parish Registers when he was working on the book now. Was he looking only at the land records and the abstracts produced by the Reverend Frederick Brown and others. Did he look for the wills at the Prerogative Court of Canterbury? I have to keep remembering that he did not have access to online material back in 1912. Was he going on word of mouth for the various descendants of Robert? That might explain some of the actual errors in his early chart. He lived at South Molton and one of my 2x great grandmother Elizabeth Rew's brother lived at Sheepwash near Bishops Nympton so also near South Molton. The children of Thomas, Elizabeth's brother, continued to live in the area of South Molton. They would have been cousins to his mother (second cousins but need to check that). I am thinking in the middle of the night as I awoke. Word of mouth can be very very interesting as events that were outstanding often made it down through generations but sometimes dates got confused and names. The idea does rather intrigue me. I must keep an open mind on all of that; it was not that easy to acquire materials especially when one is elderly (experiencing that myself as the Family History Library is a good fifteen minute drive away and I am less likely to head there in the winter). Early 1900s did he have a car? All of that comes to bear on my thoughts at this time on that early chart. I have made a revision of William's chart (William (Robert 3, William 2, John 1).

All of the emphasis in William's line finally falls upon son Thomas whose daughter married into the Worth family. The other lines are pretty much forgotten by James Sanders in  his writeup.

Good thoughts to have as I work my way through into the Fifth Generation. Again the mention of a Westeron grandchild is a mite confusing unless Ursula (Wilmot) married a Westeron/Westerne and that marriage not yet located. Christian (Webber) Siderfin's will (PCC) was a gift as there is so much good information in it. I still wonder why James Sanders used Brown's abstract but he is in South Molton and it is 1912 and London is a long way to go to read the wills. 

Cleaning later and must go back to sleep. Woke up thinking again about the logic I must apply to James Sander' work. More than one hundred years have passed and the computer age is so very very different from the way one would have approached family research in James Sanders' time. I think extracting information and assigning it to generations is going to work well and will continue with that process and try to handle the differences as I move along.



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