By Maureen Storey
By Maureen StoreyIn this journal we welcome two new members, Rosemary Camp and Carole Mitchell, and two members who have rejoined, Beverley Carr and Nancy McCarthy.
Rosemary is a descendant of Mary Soole, the elder daughter of Nicholas Walker Soole and his first wife Lydia Ellis. Nicholas was born in Ickleton, Cambridgeshire, in 1808 and married Lydia there on 4 October 1827. Lydia died in 1830, leaving Nicholas to care for their two daughters who were aged 1 and 3. In 1832 Nicholas married Lydia’s sister Susan. Like many of the Ickleton Sooles, Nicholas was a carpenter, a trade that he passed on to his four sons. In the late 1830s he and Susan moved their family just over the county border to the village of Chrishall in Essex, where they lived until their deaths in 1880 and 1897, respectively.
Carole is researching the family of her mother, Dorothy Eileen Soles, the daughter of Thomas and Winifred (Pulham) Soles, who was born in Great Rollwright, Oxford, in 1922. Dorothy became estranged from her family and it is only recently that Carole has made contact with her first cousin, our webmaster Tim Soles. Tim and Carole belong to our largest Gloucestershire family which has been traced back as far as the marriage of William Soul and Mary Sansom in Cirencester, Gloucestershire, in 1749.
Nancy’s 3×great grandparents Mary Sole and William Kidman married at St Dunstan’s in the West, London on 11 April 1814. William and Mary set up home in St Neots, Cambridgeshire, where he worked as a confectioner. Mary Sole was born in Caldecote, Cambridgeshire in 1797, one of the three children of John and Mary Sole and is part of a family that has been traced back to Stretham, Cambridgeshire in the late sixteenth century.
Beverley’s family has been traced back as far as William Soal and Ann Tanner who married in Canterbury, Kent. on 13 October 1733. Their eight children were baptised in Reculver, Kent, between 1734 and 1748. Beverley’s branch of the family moved from Kent to Hackney in London in the 1860s and from there to the USA.
Coincidentally, ‘Annie Eliza Soal and Alexander Donald Henry Fossey’, an article that Beverley wrote for Soul Search in 2008 was the subject of a recent query. The article mentions that Annie Eliza’s sister Helen married Richard Tattam, who had served in the British Army in India and Laura Tattam, a descendant of Helen and Richard, wrote to ask if we knew the source of the information about Richard’s army service. Beverley is now helping Laura with her research.
Roger Sharland wrote to ask if we could identify the family of Elizabeth Sole who married Daniel Bell at Witney, Oxfordshire, on 15 Aug 1717. The only other clue he had to her identity was that Daniel and Elizabeth were committed Quakers, so he wondered if we had any Quaker records that mentioned the family. Unfortunately we were unable to help.