Yay, got my laptop back from Data Doctors! Needed a general cleanup, nothing major wrong. But they had it a week, so I haven’t done anything on the research for a week, and it was a nice break.

NOW back to the Allens 🙂

Well one thing I have learned is there are a heck of a lot of Thompsons in Lincolnshire. Bunches and bunches. And when you get back before 1800, you have to look at parish registers which don’t have a lot of information in them. Like, is this John Thompson the son of this William and Sarah or that William and Sarah? There’s no way to tell, especially if the people move around a lot, which these Thompsons tend to do. So, this is what I can tell fairly easily. Click on the thumbnail to see it bigger:

If I want to find out any more than this, I will have to pretty much document all the Thompsons in the entire county, and that will be a lot of work. So this is where I’m stopping for now.

It is interesting to note that Mary Jane’s father Thomas had parents whose surnames were both Thompson. I don’t know the degree of consanguinity between William Thompson and Jane Thompson, though. Maybe someday I can find that out, but it will take a lot of time, and it may not even be possible to follow all these people from place to place. So many of the given names are the same, and birthdates are mostly unknown. We’ll see… a good project for when I finally retire and have a lot more time.

As for the Chapmans I mentioned in the last post, Bridget Small’s parents were Walter Small and Mary (unknown). Bridget had a brother, Walter, also baptised in Fiskerton, in 1793. John Harvey’s parents were George Harvey (abt 1758-1821) and Mary Kerchival (abt 1760-1838). George Harvey’s parents were William Harvey and Elizabeth (unknown). Mary Kerchival’s father was Thomas Kerchival. I didn’t find any more about Mary Wells or Frances Graves. Another retirement project.

Now, it’s off to the Allens! Let’s see what I can find out about them 🙂

I have gotten back to Edward Chapman, born in 1754, on the Chapman line. This is the earliest Chapman that is easy to find. To go back farther will take a lot more time and effort than I want to spend right now. I want to work on other lines too. And it may be that I cannot get back any farther than Edward anyway.

Edward married Dorothy Pattinson in 1776 in Wispington, Lincolnshire. They had some children but there are no entries in the parish registry for them. Edward and his family were resettled to Langton By Wragby in 1788, according to the poor relief act. There were several conditions whereby people could move from one parish to another, so it’s not known exactly why the family moved. In Langton By Wragby, they had a son Cornelius about 1791, and Dorothy died in 1794.

In 1798, Edward married Frances Graves, and they had 7 children, all baptised in Langton By Wragby. Their first son, Joseph, was baptised in 1801.

In 1825 in Reepham, Joseph married Mary Wells, who was born in Metheringham. They had 9 children. Their first son, William, was baptised in 1826 in Reepham.

In 1848, William married Sarah Harvey in South Carlton. They had 14 children. Child number 8, our William Chapman, immigrated to the USA and married Sarah Jane Allen in 1888 in Joliet.

I am going to see if I can get any farther back on any of the female lines, before I move on to Thompsons and Allens. I do know that Sarah Harvey’s parents were John Harvey and Bridget Small, who married in 1813 in Reepham. Mary Wells’ parents were Luke Wells and Bridget (unknown). I don’t know anything yet about Frances Graves.

The Chapmans I have found so far seem to move around a bit, but stay in the same general area of Lincolnshire, near the town of Lincoln. They were mostly farmers. Lincolnshire is a mostly agricultural county, so the area where the Chapmans were from is mostly farmland surrounding small villages. I’m learning a lot about this area, and it sounds like a lovely place to visit some day…..

In the meantime, I’ll keep plugging away at these English families. I don’t have a ton of time to spend on research, and my genealogy time lately has been taken up quite a bit by watching video training sponsored by Legacy. Every week, they have a live webinar that they record for people who actually have day jobs and can’t watch the webinar live, and the recording is usually on their website for about a week for free. After that, you have to subscribe to their webinars to view them. So I try to get to the webinars during their free week. Saves me money but costs me time.

In all my spare time, I have been feverishly working on entering data into my new genealogy program. While at the same time going slowly and carefully so as not to make any mistakes. And also double-checking sources, and adding citations in the proper genealogical standard format.

I took some time to experiment with some of the reports, and the HTML output is awesome with a capital A! So much information in the database, but the reports will turn all that data into information in easy-to-understand graphs, charts, and graphics, in addition to narrative reports.

As I go along, I’m also tagging people into logical groupings that reflect areas of interest, like all the people who were born in a foreign country and then immigrated to the USA in their lifetime. These people are of interest to all the family lines. There are also specific groups that apply to only one family line, like the King’s Daughters that are on the Jolin-Paquin line. These groupings make it easier to find the ancestors that have those traits in common.

So far I have added about 1000 people, so I have a long way to go. The old program had almost 6000 people, but that includes the disproven Chapman and Thompson lines, plus some unrelated people that I was trying to keep track of to see if they fit into the tree somewhere. I’m thinking when I’m done with the proven people, it will be about 4000. This includes director ancestors, their spouses and children, and the parents of the spouses. In some cases, if I have the information I also include the childrens’ spouse and parents.

So I’m hoping to have everyone entered and verified by the end of this year. Wish me luck! 🙂

I finally got a new genealogy program, Legacy, and I have spent the past couple weeks learning about it with their sample database. It’s kinda slow going. Pretty much all genealogy programs have basic stuff in common, like pedigree views and family groups, you just have to figure out how each one works, what do the buttons and icons mean, that kind of thing. One of the main things I like about Legacy is that it is so configurable, I can set the UI how I want it to look. In my previous program, I was used to working with a timeline kind of window, but the Legacy timeline is a bit different. Legacy does have more reports, and I’m anxious to try the HTML output for some of them. There are also maps, which should be nice on the website. And there is a Research Guidance feature that looks at where and when a person lived, and lists sources to check for more information, which is nice because I have no idea what kinds of books and other resources are available. I can’t look them up if I don’t know about them.

Another thing I have decided to do on this genealogy do-over, is to separate out the data into four databases, one for my mom (the original C-A-T lines), one for my dad (Kevish-Posa), one for hubby’s mom (Ferber-Bruns), and one for hubby’s dad (Holder-Paquin-Jolin). That should make it much easier to find an ancestor in any of the lines. I’m starting with the C-A-T lines for now.

So that’s all for now, gonna get back to Legacy!