By Maureen Storey
In this journal we welcome Lizzie Love and Colin Sole back to the Society.
Lizzie’s family has been traced back to the siblings Philip, Jane, Edward and James Soale, who first appear in the Sussex records in the mid-1600s. Although their baptisms haven’t been found, they are identified as siblings in Edward’s will of 1663. The family at that time seems to have been settled in Steyning and the surrounding area.
Colin is a member of a family that first surfaced in Sullington, Sussex in the 1590s. The first record we have for them is the baptism of Richard Sole, son of Richard and Johan, in Sullington on 23 Sep 1592. Both baby Richard and his mother died shortly after the baptism. Richard remarried in 1594, and he and his second wife (Mary Master) had six children between 1596 and 1608, all baptised in Sullington. Their son John settled in Rustington, Sussex, thus beginning the family’s long connection with that village.
The Australian birth, marriage and death records include the 1863 marriage of a Charles Meredith Soule and the births of his seven children. While the middle name of Meredith and the fact that one of his sons was named Bradley suggested that Charles was a previously unknown son of Bradley Sole and Ann Meredith, who married in Sligo, Ireland, in 1837, we had no proof that this was actually the case and for some years the two trees remained unlinked. Recently, however, we received an e-mail from Miranda Sage, whose husband is Charles’s great grandson. Miranda had had some trouble tracing Charles’s origin, largely due to the different places and dates of birth that he had given in various records. His marriage certificate says he was born in New York in about 1837, and his father was Captain Bradley Soule, which made Miranda think he was American and that his father was a sea captain. However, having had no luck in finding him in the American records, she obtained his children’s birth certificates and found that on some of them his place of birth was given as Ireland. On Googling Bradley Soule she found our website and wrote to ask if we could throw any light on the family. We were able to give her some details of Bradley and the family in Ireland and to tell her that the title ‘captain’ came from his position as a Trinity House officer (he was a lighthouse keeper) and she helped us to fill in some of the blanks in our records for the Australian branch of the family. Although we’ve still not found a birth/baptism for Charles, it is now thought that he was born in Ireland in about 1840. He arrived in Australia on the Hope on 16 Jan 1862, when he was described as a labourer.
