By Maureen Storey
By Maureen StoreyIn this journal we welcome back to the Society Tony Jackson and Hilary Hale.
My husband Tony is continuing his search for the origins of William Soall, who married Clementina Benson at St Leonard’s Church, Shoreditch, on 22 Jun 1775. He told me that one of the trees for this family on Ancestry has identified him as the William Saul, who was baptised at St Leonard’s on 2 Jan 1749. This is perhaps a classic example of why you should always double check data that you acquire from such sources, because the
St Leonard’s registers also record the burial of young William on 22 Aug 1749, aged 8 months.
Hilary has been consolidating her family tree, adding information gleaned from certificates and newspapers articles etc. Hilary is a member of the Sussex family that has been traced back to Richard Sole and Mary Master, who married in East Preston on 19 Jun 1594. Hilary would like to extend her photo archive of the family and would love to hear from anyone who has photos of Charles Sole (1823-1901) and Sarah Allcorn (1827-1882) and their descendants.
Amongst the wills that I’ve recently been using to add information to our families was that of ‘William Soule of Hardwick in the parish of Elkstone’ (Gloucestershire). William is at the head of one of our smaller trees (with only 24 members) and it seemed worth checking the neighbouring parish registers to see if they contained any further information on the family. Although I didn’t find anything that was obviously connected to William, I did find a Sowle family in Bishops Cleeve that seems to have been missed completely when Ancestry digitised the parish records. John Sowle, son of George and Alice, was baptised in Bishop’s Cleeve on 18 Sep 1575 and worked as a smith in the hamlet of Gotherington. John married Margery (marriage not yet found) and the couple had 11 children between 1592 and 1618. We don’t yet know what happened to most of these children, presumably many died in infancy, though I haven’t found burials for them. At least one, Thomas (baptised 19 Nov 1594) reached adulthood and had three daughters of his own. However, the child that will probably attract most attention to the family is young George Sowle, who was baptised on 23 Sep 1596 and is therefore a new candidate to be George Soule of the Mayflower.
