The curious case of Rebecca Lehman

It’s hard to tell if this is a case of a mistaken name that has been copied over and over, or if there is more to the story. However…

Rebecca Lehman (c1801-1849) always shows up in on-line genealogies (at Ancestry and Familysearch etc.) as the wife of William Allis and mother of Caroline who married Joseph Leesley and emigrated to Nebraska, USA.
Their children were baptised in the Bratoft, Toynton and Leake area of Lincolnshire, England with the first born in 1825 at Bratoft.
No marriage for a William Allis to a Rebecca Lehman has been found.

The parish register for Bratoft, Lincolnshire on 3 June 1824 shows the marriage between William Allis and Rebecca Louth. Both sign the register and the entry is very clear. Both were also single when they married. Assuming Rebecca was born around 1801 (based on her age given at her burial in 1849), there is a Rebecca Louth baptised at Addlethorpe, Lincolnshire (about 5 miles from Bratoft) in 1802 but there is no equivalent event for a Rebecca Lehman. I am therefore convinced that this should be Rebecca Louth but I don't know the original source for Lehman.

Does anyone know how William’s wife came to be a Lehman and not Louth?

From Lincolnshire to Colorado

One branch of the Lincolnshire Allis family moved to Colorado in America in the 1880s. It is not known what prompted the move but they were from a family of nine children (of which one died in infancy). After their father's death in 1880 the family appears to have split and in 1881 the eldest son George Allis had moved to Hogsthorpe about 6 miles south of Beesby with his sister Mary and brother Charles where they are farming 72 acres at "Marsh Retreat". Meanwhile William is living with his sister Rachel in Alford and their mother is farming with Emma and Alfred at Beesby and John is working in London.

Two of the brothers, Charles and John Allis sailed to America around 1883.It seems that they didn’t head straight for Colorado but they did settle there by 1887 in Douglas county some 30-odd miles south of Denver.
Charles leased some land in the Greenland area, later buying it. In 1908 he built a reservoir still known as the Allis reservoir which may be seen on Google Earth [at about 39° 7'57.63"N, 104°51'9.89"W]
They operated a meat market as well as the ranch which was said to be of about 1700 acres by 1899 (5000 acres reported in an English newspaper).
More details of their enterprise and photographs of their ranch may be seen here
http://larkspurhistoricalsociety.org/?page_id=824
Their ranch is still known as the Historic Allis Ranch and their are further details here
https://www.douglas.co.us/museum/vex13/index.htm

Their brother George moved out from England to join them in 1896 with his wife Annie and two children, but died suddenly in February 1899 of pneumonia.
Annie was from London and George met her possibly via John who was working in the area. By 1891 they had moved to Leicester where he was a butcher before finally emigrating on board the Majestic from Liverpool, arriving in New York on the 29th April 1896.

After George’s death Annie remained in the Monument area of Colorado.
John Allis fell ill at the start of 1901 and Annie married him in the January. It was said that the care she gave him prolonged his life but he died in the March of 1901. Annie remarried a year later and moved to California.

Charles continued to thrive and lived until 1927. He married Wilhelmina Steimle in August 1901 in what was said to be a major social event for the area, and they had seven children becoming prominent citizens in the local area.

Once the railways had opened up the interior of America there were various schemes to attract settlers, some operated by the railways themselves along with emigration groups in England.
In Colorado the climate was said to be dry, sunny, and bracing and the soil suitable for a variety of fruits and vegetables as well as raising sheep and cattle.
The journey from New York was almost entirely by railway. In 1890 the fare from London to New York (from Reynolds Newspaper 13 Jul 1890)was £3-16s in steerage, and the train fare from New York to Denver was £8-12s-6d or a total of £12-8s-6d. The journey could also be taken via Liverpool and Halifax, Nova Scotia with onward train via Montreal, Ottawa, Detroit and Chicago to Denver for a total of £12-4s

Sourcing of records (continued)

To add to the pain of finding records and adding sources that had been forgotten, it was decided to improve the standard of citations given in my TMG (The Master Genealogist) event sourcing. Evidence Explained by Elizabeth Mills (now in its 3rd edition) appears to be the standard to follow. Its style is based on the Chicago Manual of Style but with considerable extensions for citing the many varieties of sources used in genealogy.

There appears to be considerable differences of opinion in how much detail to add to sources in genealogy software packages. Certainly there should be enough to allow someone else to find the source material at a later date if possible.
An experience in trying to find the original material used in a book about the history of a Lincolnshire village was a lesson. The book dates from the 1930s and at that time some of the material was not deposited at the county or national archives. Nonetheless, after a time all of the material that was of interest, except for one item, has been discovered. There was just enough guidance but more would have been useful.

Evidence Explained starts with some fundamentals of citing sources - when to use italics, quotes, semicolons etc. - and builds from there. It does seem extraordinarily finicky at first and at a personal level it will depend on what you intend to do with your genealogy records as to how much time you invest in the art of citations. As I want to publish my family history it seems useful to make it look a little more professional than it was.
I know that in my branch of engineering it is relatively easy to spot the beginner by the way diagrams are drawn, or reports written, and so on.
However, when seeing how long some of the source citations get to be especially when the record is on-line via a record provider and then quoting a further repository makes one want to take short-cuts. For example, would it be reasonable to cut out much of the citation for a census entry where there are several on-line providers carrying the same record and the indexing makes the record easy to find at any of them? (Just give the TNA reference and family name for example?)

These questions are still be worked on but I take much more notice of the detail of sources given in books than I used to.
Anyway, much of what is in Elizabeth Mill’s book has been taken on-board, and it has proved to be very useful.

It has taken a lot of time re-organise the sources in TMG but the end results in reports are looking better for it.
I will eventually to get back to some proper research but the time spent on learning a lot of new tricks is hopefully worthwhile.

Sourcing of records

The summer has been spent not so much on finding new records as finding old ones again.
I was surprised on running a report in the genealogy software that I use to see the large number of unsourced records.
It wasn’t in the mainstream family line but in a number of offshoots mainly, and was probably when a new family had been discovered and they were all added in haste.
I thought I had been quite strict with ensuring that when a new record or event was added the source was recorded at the same time. However the report proved me wrong and it has cost a large number of days to put some of it right and there’s a fair bit more to do.
In some cases it was seen that the omissions (and indeed errors) were from several years ago and never rechecked.

Running the report was depressing in some ways, but it has resulted in a good looking over of the family trees and with some up-side.
What was noticed in tracking down various events was how much more material there is on-line. For example, where evidence of a burial was initially sourced from the National Burial Index, a number of actual parish registers images were found in the new search giving a primary record rather than just an index entry.


Three lessons, or at least reminders the hard way.
1. However painful add the sources at the time
2. Periodically recheck on-line sources if a visit to the archive cannot be made, and update any source references to an index if possible.
3. Go over the whole tree from time to time and correct some of those early mistakes

An interesting note in a parish register

While browsing the parish registers of Newton Flotman in Norfolk there was a set of entries for the period 1759 to 1765 accompanied by a note which reads...

"The preceeding list of christenings and burials is not to be depended upon as exact. There being no register book in the parish at that time: Nor any account kept from the beginning of the year 1759 to the middle of the year 1763. So that the account during that time was afterwards collected from the memories of the inhabitants by the person who entered upon the curacy of this parish in 1763."

I have found various gaps in parish registers but this was the first note to the effect seen with an attempt to piece some of the missing records together by a curate who took record keeping seriously.

The Allice / Ellis family of Bridgwater, Durleigh and Wembdon, Somerset.

Ellis or Allis?

The origins of this family were at first thought to be perhaps an offshoot from the Allis family of Bristol, or even a separate group of long standing in the area. John Alys of Bryggewater Somerset, a mercer, was seen in the common pleas in 1475, 1477 and 1484 for example. However, this now seems not to be the case.

A headstone in the churchyard at Wembdon, Somerset for George, Robert, Sarah and John Allice shows them to be of the same family where Robert and Sarah are the mother and father.

John gave his birthplace in the 1851 census as Durleigh which is close to Bridgwater but the baptism for Robert was not found there, however there is one in Bridgwater, the son of Peter and Catherine Ellis.

Peter and Catherine had a number of children between 1794 and 1818 baptised at Durleigh and Bridgwater (St. Mary) with surnames Allice, Wallis, Ellis, Allis and Alice.

In the 1851 census Peter gives his birthplace as Butterleigh in Devon and his baptism can be found on the 12 January 1769 with his parents Robert and Rebecca Ellis. He married Catherine Trapmill as Peter Ellis on the 31 March in Bridgwater.

Most in the family continued to use Ellis while a few others used Allice which compared to the other families looked at over the country is unusual. In some cases the name appears to have been used interchangeably with some documents having Allice / Allis and others Ellis for the same person. For example, Ellen Ellis (birth registered in Exeter in 1865) the daughter of James Ellis and Mary Ann Mayne married in Wembdon and she signed the marriage register as Ellen Allice. When their children were registered her maiden name was shown as Ellis. (Interestingly the marriage records that James Allice married Mary Ann Mayne in Trinity, Somerset, though James did only make his mark).

This family appears to be essentially Ellis originating from Devon but where some members used Allice (with occasional Allis spellings). As this was used on a number of documents including wills and polling records, and over a long period of time, it appears to be a deliberate choice on the part of the Wembdon, Somerset branch. It certainly wasn't just a mis-spelling on the part of one or two officials, though it is possible that might have been the start of it.

They don't like to make it easy for us do they? 
 

Use of Family search and Ancestry etc. and collecting data in a genealogy software package

I have used Family Tree Maker to sync. to an Ancestry family tree but this has tended to be one-way, i.e. make changes in FTM and upload to Ancestry. I have also played with Legacy family tree which is quite a good software package. This has the ability to link to a (free) familysearch account: a facility which has not been used so far.
It's probably worth mentioning that the main database is The Master Genealogist which doesn't have the ability to synchronise with web-based family tree software. This is still a lovely bit of software if not looking too modern these days.

In a mood of experimentation I recently tried a couple of different approaches to see what I was missing.


1. Use the Ancestry hints and bring data into the Ancestry family tree, then sync. with FTM for a local copy, and
2. Using Legacy family tree and their ability to log-in to Familysearch and compare or find information on an individual.

In both cases the ability to inspect records about a person and bring that information into your family tree with a few mouse clicks is compelling.
In practice though I found it very easy to import poor information (e.g a woman's surname by marriage and not by birth) - perhaps this is simply a poor methodology on my part and looking at some training videos would help.
Conversely it was seen that in sharing data with Familysearch it could be easy to upload poor information to them which might then be passed onto others.
I have seen some Ancestry trees with completely wrong county names for some places, so maybe this is how it happened. The ability to import the source information is nice though, even if it is in Ancestry or Familysearch standard format.

To me the best feature is to be given information that I may not have noticed before. 

I once read a comment from someone suggesting the best way of entering people into a family tree is to do it slowly individual by individual and get to know them as you add the data. I still think this is the best approach.