Ancestry now has the Dorset parish registers online and a quick search brought up the marriage of Ellis Ellis and Sarah Wellspring. They are one set of my 5x great grandparents and I really hadn't expected to find out more about them until I made a trip to the Dorset Record Office in Dorchester and that was rather on the bottom of my list of things to do in Dorset. I had found the Ellis family in Andover and began to wonder if they had moved on from there but evidently not.
The parents of Ellis Ellis turned out to be Thomas Ellis and Mary Bound who were themselves married 27 Dec 1703 at Winterborne Stickland. The Ellis family has been in Winterborne Stickland for quite a while prior to this date so I may, when I read the register, find a baptism for Thomas and his parents. The Bound family is also found in Winterborne Stickland and a quick search did not locate Mary's baptism or parents but I will leave that for the Ellis research day once I am back into the schedule once again.
The youngest daughter of Ellis Ellis and Sarah Wellspring was Sarah Ellis who married William Knight 7 Aug 1775 at Winterborne Stickland. I may now be able to settle which of the eight children attributed to William and Sarah are actually theirs. I am in somewhat of a debate on the results which were given to me for the Knight family that I descend from and what I am finding. But I shall save all of that register reading for my research day.
I rather believe that my Dorset line are primarily agricultural labourers and skilled tradesmen as far as I can tell thus far. They all lived in the Winterborne Valley within about ten miles of Blandford Forum. A large number of them suddenly moved to Lancashire in the mid 1800s for work but they seemed to find their roots in Dorset coming back in their old age.
I am very happy that the Dorset parish registers and wills are now scanned and available on Ancestry. I will make very good use of that material. When I visit Dorset I really would like to drive about and see everything. It is a very rural area and quite full of history as we discovered when we were there in 2008. I would have been sad to spend days in the Registry Office with all the goodness of Dorset beckoning to me. It is also the home of a number of my husband's ancestors; they having left in the 1630s to go to America. His roots are a whole lot further back but he rather enjoyed visiting St Mary's Beaminster Church where his 10x great grandparents John Nyle and Johane Paviot were married in 1605. We had a great visit to that Church.
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