Well it’s a good thing I’m going through all the data we have had for years, because it looks like there is a bit more wrong than just our great-grandfather William Chapman’s parents. After working on William Chapman and Sarah Harvey’s children, I started looking at Sarah Jane Allen (who married William and Sarah’s son William) and decided to look at the Allens. But then as usual in genealogical research, one goes off on a tangent. The tangent started with Sarah Jane’s parents Charles Allen and Mary Jane Thompson, and then led to looking at Mary Jane’s parents Thomas Thompson and Elizabeth Staples.
The tree showed 15 children for Thomas Thompson and Elizabeth Staples. You can see them on the old typed pedigree pages if you still have them. But from what I can tell so far, they really had only 9 children. Other researchers with trees online do not show the extra children either. I think in our case, the extra children came from not really knowing the correct parents, which can be problematic in the UK indexes because the mother’s married name is used, rather than her maiden name. Because our names are so common, it can be very difficult to determine if you are looking at the right Thomas and Elizabeth Thompson. It looks like what Cheryl had done is picked up some children of other couples named Thomas and Elizabeth Thompson, and added the children to our Thompson family.
The Thompsons we are interested in lived in Waddington, and the other families lived in Bardney and Washingborough. So remove from our family any child born in Bardney or Washingborough. These are the children for our Thompson family as best I can tell right now:
Richard, christened 5 Jun 1825.
Ann, christened 3 Mar 1827
Mary, christened 5 May 1829
Sarah, christened 7 Jan 1831
Harriet, christened 26 Aug 1833
Phoebe, christened 29 Mar 1835
Betsy, christened 20 Feb 1837
Thomas, christened 31 Mar 1838
Thomas, christened 13 May 1842
Of course, I will need to borrow the microfilm to be sent to the local Family History Center here, and verify the children with the church registers. But this is the best I can figure out currently. No doubt I will encounter more surprises as I continue to verify our tree, so stay tuned. I will post more information as I find it.