More of the wonderful women...

ancestors on Thursday...
I've been having fun looking at all kinds of information about 11) Mary Farnum (or Farnham) Poor.  I've  a birth day (with a year) and a marriage date, and a death date.  Some of the sources are about a Mary Poor who had another maiden name...so she's not my X6 great grandmother, and therefore I click "ignore."

Then I'm on the final check...and there are 36 separate ancestry trees to consider adding information from.  Already I've checked off her 11 children, only 2 of whom were born perhaps in the same year.

And so before I delve into this tedious but necessary winnowing process, (after all some of them have 30 or more sources for their information) I have to figure out which village she had really been born in.  That will narrow things down a bit.  Rochester, England or Southampton, Hampshire, England.

So I'm taking a break, and will be back to check on things in a minute.  After all who says blogs are written in one sitting...you just never know!

I decided to go with the first tree, which had so many resources, after copying a few of them to my tree.  And it mentioned a church for the Rochester birthplace, so I think it's pretty likely. St Nicholas, Rochester, Kent, England.

Rochester Castle across the Medway River,  engraving, G.F. Sargent c. 1836

Eastgate House, Rochester, England

Rochester Cathedral

Wikipedia offers some facts about Rochester, Kent, England:

It is situated at the lowest bridging point of the River Medway about 30 miles (50 km) from London.

Neolithic remains have been found in the vicinity of Rochester; over time it has been variously occupied by Celts, Romans, Jutes and/or Saxons.

Rochester was for many years a favourite of Charles Dickens, who owned nearby Gads Hill Place, Higham, basing many of his novels on the area.

St Nicholas' Church was built in 1421 beside the cathedral to serve as a parish church for the citizens of Rochester. The ancient cathedral included the Benedictine monastic priory of St Andrew. 

Rochester's pre-1537 diocese, under the jurisdiction of the Church of Rome, covered a vast area extending into East Anglia and included all of Essex.^[22]

So the next fun thing was finding out that11)  Mary Farnum was sister of 11) John Farnum, so their parents became double great great grandparents to two of my other ancestors.  Well, it's bound to happen somewhere that cousins get married...and probably several times in everyone's tree.  But these were first cousins four times removed, I think that's the way it works.  If you know the system, let me know if I'm right here.

11) Mary Farnum Poor and 11) Daniel Poor had a daughter 10) Elizabeth who married 10) Jacob Marsten.  Their daughter 9) Martha married 9) Samuel Granger, and their son 8) Jacob Granger married 8) Sarah Farnum.

Now go back up the generations. 8) Sarah Farnum's parents were 9) Steven Farnum and 9) Hannah Richardson, and 9) Steven's parents were 10) John Farnum and 10) Mary Tyler, and 10) John's parents were 11) John Farnum and 11) Rebecca Kent.

11) John Farnum was 11) Mary Farnum Poor's brother, so their parents 12) Ralph Farnum and 12) Alice Harris Farnum were great great grandparents of those descendents 8) Sarah Farnum as well as her husband 8) Jacob Granger.  (They might not have known it unless they stayed in the same community where 4 generations might have been remembered.)

8) Sarah and 8) Jacob Granger were great x2 grandparents of my own grandmother, Ada Swasey Rogers.

This is fun and certainly not the kind of math I learned in school. Algebra and geometry might go into drawing these lines between folks...but otherwise, the cousins, argh!

But what's happened on Ancestry is that Mary is now entered twice, as two different people.  But I can't merge them.  They are the same entry, as the message tells me every time I try to merge two people into one.  And one of them has a different death date than the other...but everything else looks the same.

So rather than having more information about my ancestors, I've gotten bogged down again in the headaches of Ancestry DOT *gotohel* COM.

That's all folks.