By Maureen Storey
In this journal we welcome new member Jean Sole, who is researching the family of her husband Geoffrey Sole. Geoff and Jean attended our first annual meeting at Olney in 1992 and Geoff was for a time a member of the Society, but it is only now that she has retired that Jean has the time to take up family history research again. Geoff’s grandparents were Frederick Charles Sole and Jenny Kate Newman who married in 1910 in Braughing, HRT, where they brought up their four children. Frederick was a blacksmith and at the 1921 census was working for C Chapman, a builder in Standon, HRT. Frederick’s family has been traced back to John Sole and Sarah Pratt who married in Therfield in 1756, with probable connections back to John Sole and Sarah Hale who married in Throcking, HRT, in 1692.
Cheryl Coker wrote to say that she had recently discovered that her grandfather’s cousin Dorothy Alice Miles had married Herbert George Soall in Bromley in 1956 and she asked if we knew whether they had any children. From our records it appears that the couple remained childless, but we were able to fill in more of Herbert’s family background.
David Miles is researching the family of Martha Sole of Chartham, KEN, who was born in 1727 and married Richard Blackman there in 1756. He said that he had traced the family back to Thomas Sole of Elham, KEN, who died in 1540. He’d seen pedigrees that claimed a Thomas Solle who had married an Alice Rooke of Mersham in the early 1600s was part of the family but that he couldn’t substantiate this. Unfortunately we couldn’t help David with the marriage (he later found evidence that it was in fact wrong) but his message intrigued me because we hadn’t linked the Chartham and Elham families. When asked what evidence he had for the link, David said that according to the 1734 Register of Electors in Kent Nicholas Sole of Chartham held land in Elham. Further evidence comes from the wills of Richard Sole (1621) , John Sole (1584) and Thomas Sole (1540). These name and give relationships between multiple generations of the family, and this has allowed our Chartham and Elham families to be combined with Thomas Sole of Elham (died 1540) as the earliest known ancestor.
The major family history sites are still regularly adding new databases and are worth checking periodically but none of the recent additions have made major contributions to our database. The most helpful ones recently have been the parish registers and school admission registers for the East Riding of Yorkshire and the Hampshire wills index, which Ancestry has added.