Take a Second or Third Look!

If you've read articles or taken a tutorial or seminar on doing your family history, you will likely have been told numerous times to go back and re-examine documents/files that you have from several years ago. Now, why on earth would you want to do that? You've already entered the details from the docs into your database and filed them away, right? Well, probably. However, I have learned, over and over again, that as we learn more about who is in our family or what information can be important, it is well worth our time to revisit those docs that you scanned and/or photocopied several years ago. If you do, you'll likely find answers to some questions that may have bothered you for months or even years. Here's my latest example of this.

Most of us have seen in some of our trees that Jane, d/o John & Mary, was variously referred to as Leah or Jane Leah. When I first saw this, it was in John O'Donoghue McIlmoyle's Family Tree from 1890 and he noted that he wasn't sure if this was a connection or not. At the time, I had no idea where he'd gotten this name from. Many years later, I found Jane's marriage entry in 1790 to David Hunter. The microfilm was very poor and the writing was not great either. I could see how someone could have mistaken it for 'Leah' though to me, it definitely looked like Jane. This of course was after I had spent several years wading through miles of microfilmed records of that time frame being parish records, land records and American Revolution Loyalist records and had become quite proficient at reading the handwriting of the period. So this, I thought, is where the 'Leah' must have come from.

Well, actually, I'm now quite sure that it DIDN'T come from that record! I was reviewing a file folder on my computer which contains numerous McIlmoyl(e) documents and checking them out to see if they were either something that should be in the 'Book' or if the info was something that needed to be included. One of the records was a baptism of Jane & David Hunter's son, Samuel. I'm sure that I had glanced at it at some time in the past, though I'm equally sure that I didn't look very closely. How do I know this? Well, because the minister had recorded this event as being the baptism of Samuel, son of David Hunter and Leah his wife!!!! My eyes snapped back to the beginning as I re-read this entry and, yes, that was really what it said.....well, no wonder John O Mc was confused as to whether this was really Jane or another person and whether or not she was connected.

So, if one saw this baptism record first, then saw the marriage record (or for that matter, never saw the marriage entry), it's extremely easy to see why the handwriting in the marriage record could be interpreted to be 'Leah'.

So, what do we take away from this? I would say several things. Firstly, as we've been told, it pays to go back and re-visit documents we collected a few years ago to make sure we've recorded all the info we should have and, that we didn't misinterpret something or miss a reference to someone we might not have known was a connection. Secondly, how do we analyze this conflicting info about a single person? Well, here's my analysis.....the marriage record definitely says 'Jane' so we know that Jane McIlmoyl was in fact married to David Hunter. We also probably know that Jane died fairly young but was still married to David at the time of her death and had -- children. We may also have found her petition for land grant as the daughter of a Loyalist which gave her name as Jane. Lastly, we know that Leah was not a common name within this family nor in the area of Ireland where she was born and that John & Mary did not give any of their other children more than a single forename so it seems unlikely that they'd have given Jane two of them.

My conclusion? That the minister who baptised Samuel Hunter made an error in the recording of said baptism and that David Hunter's wife was Jane McIlmoyl, not Leah and not Jane Leah.

Now, are you all aware that there were two David Hunters in the same general geographic area, in the same generation? This has caused much confusion over who were the children of whom. In my next posting, I'll give the details of this confusing family group.

8-)
JoanMC