Monday 5 October 2009

4th: Happenstances galore

Do so love it when assorted threads all come together.

A message arrived from ancestry accepting a correction I'd lodged some time ago so I checked to see who it was.
As previously advised, I have loaded the basic ancestral tree onto ancestry (suspect the link will only work if you have a sub, or are accessing it via a library), and am adding connected people as I research them and find source data.
So, given the correction was for a connected person, I added them to the tree, added the source I'd previously viewed, and connected them up to the previously loaded common ancestor.
This led me to review where I'd got to with the family of Richard PEARCE and Mary HELSON.
Putting the hints ancestry provided together with checking now more readily available sources, I've finally solved a long standing mystery (to me anyway, others may well have solved it long ago), AND connected up two previously separate branches of my Devon families.
As I checked off the family of their son Robert, and couldn't find Robert and Elizabeth's son Richard anywhere in Canada after 1871, it dawned on me that I may have solved the mystery about the Mary PEARCE who married John OXENHAM and moved to Michigan.
I now believe I've found the final proof (or sufficient additional circumstantial evidence) that she was indeed the dtr of Richard PEARCE and Mary HELSON.
John and Mary's dtr Betsy OXENHAM married a Richard H PEARCE/PEARSE/PIERCE, and shortly before their marriage, both had appeared in a Michigan Census as niece/nephew of John & Grace KEAGLE (that's still a mystery for another day).
Richard looked like he might be the son of a Robert & Eliza PEARCE in Belleville by 1851
I didn't have enough additional information at the time I last investigated this.
Coming to the family from a completely different angle this time, I landed on Eliza or Elizabeth CREBER, dtr of John and Ann (WORTH) CREBER as one of the hints ancestry provided and found that at least one tree thought she had married Robert PEARSE and emigrated to Ontario - yes Belleville.
Guess I'll have to re-check the family of John and Ann (WORTH) CREBER however, as I had assumed she had died young, given there was a later baptism in Walkhampton of an Eliza to John and Ann.
Either it's a different John and Ann, OR someone was telling porkies, and the 1829 Eliza is actually a dtr of a dtr? I do admit I was a bit sceptical about adding her to the family, as Ann would be abt 51 by then.
It looks fairly clear that the 1821 Eliza or Elizabeth is indeed the one in Belleville, but I'm basing that mainly on two facts.
A son named Worth in one census (and William in the next), and that they were living next door to a Henry CREBER of an age and birthplace to be her brother Henry CREBER, whom I'd lost in England after a possibly 1841 sighting at Sampford Spiney with what looked like his cousin Richard.
So two found families for the price of one census entry, and the descendants of the HELSON/PEEK/ALGAR families matching up with those of the BARTER/KINGs.

I've updated the CREBER and PEEK/ALGAR descendant charts to include these new twigs, as well as adding assorted source data to them on the ancestry tree which may help others find more, given the variations in the indexing for these surnames:
PIERCE, PEARSE, PEARCE, CREBER, CHEEBER, CHUBER, CREBAR just to name a few I can remember from today.

Next WorldConnect database update will include shifting some of the above people into my main database from LornaPotential, which holds those I've researched in some way and suspect they'll connect, but lack sufficient proof.

Back to the COMBELLACKs next, as Alan has kindly provided a copy of his data for me to work thru.

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