By John Slaughter
Welcome to new member Rosalyn McDonald and a welcome back to John Westerdale and Glenda Manwaring.
Rosalyn is a cousin of Glenda Manwaring so they are both descended from Jeremiah Saul who emigrated to Australia in 1847. The Australian descendants are well documented in Glenda’s book Leaves on the Tree of Saul. There has always been a question mark about Jeremiah’s father John and whether he married Mary Parkin or Mary Ann Preston. In fact it has been theorised that he may have married both. I have written about this previously (December 2018) so will not repeat the arguments here.
I received an e-mail from Tessa Kendall, with whom I had corresponded previously some years ago. She is a descendant of what we call the Saul Rodrigues family. Again I have previously written about this family of Portuguese extraction (April 2005 and April 2010), who over a period of time had slowly dropped the Rodrigues name and adopted Saul as their Anglicized surname. We have them recorded on a chart back to a David Saul Rodrigues who married Reyna Da Costa Andrade, died in 1800 and was buried in the Portuguese Burial Ground at Mile End, London. Tessa has provided some earlier information and I quote from her e-mail.
Yes, they were definitely Portuguese originally. I’ve got David Saul’s father as Saul Rodrigues (but don’t know if Saul was his first name or if that’s missing), born 1730 died 22.12.1780 and married Sipora Abendana 5.1.1752 at Bevis Marks. His father was Isaac, born 1703 in Amsterdam, married Sarah Pretto, born 1714, married 1732 in Amsterdam (those dates don’t quite add up, I know). Isaac’s father was Abraham, born 1664.
That’s all I have, so it looks like they went from Portugal to Amsterdam and then to London as a lot of Portuguese Jews did then.
I’ve also managed to find out quite a lot about the da Costa de Andrade family (later just Andrade) who went from Portugal to the Caribbean to escape the Inquisition and became involved in the cocoa and chocolate industry. I had some information about the Saul Rodrigues family being involved in that too but can’t remember where I put it (not lost, just tucked away somewhere).
Would you please keep my email address just in case anyone gets in touch. I must have a lot of distant cousins as there were a lot of children, some who stayed Jewish, some married out. I have no idea how Margaret Saul Rodrigues, my great grandmother who lived in London, met and married the son of a West Country shoe maker as people didn’t travel much then. The Kendalls weren’t Jewish (as far as I know, although there were some crypto Jews in the Bristol area). It doesn’t help that there’s no one I know left alive to ask, which is why I’d like to find some distant cousins”.
Maureen Storey asked what I knew about a William Saul baptised in 1716 in St Dunstan’s Stepney as one of her members wondered if it could have a connection to their ancestors. I doubt that my reply was of much help but think it useful to publish my reply here.
“Not sure that I am going to be a lot of help here. I have looked at the two records mentioned and they show the following.
Baptism 2 September 1716,
St Dunstan and All Saints, Stepney, William Saul son of William and Mary, a Green Joyner.
Marriage 26 May 1743 William Saul of the parish of St Dunstan, Stepney, widower to Theophilia Hacshirt of the parish of St James Garlickhythe, London, widow.
It looks a strong possibility that the marriage and baptism go together but I don’t have either on my London charts.
There is a public tree on Ancestry that allocates the 1716 baptism to a William Saul who married an Elizabeth Powell on 12 August 1736, he being described as of the parish
of St Leonard’s, Shoreditch, a weaver. I have this marriage as being a possible for a William Saul
and Elizabeth who had children baptised at St Leonard’s, Shoreditch between 1743 and 1754. I would not put too much store by the Ancestry tree as I see that they have recorded the William Saul as having been buried in 1789. When I looked at the burial entry it gave his age as 87 years, so hardly a good fit for a 1716 baptism”.