DEVON-L Archives

From:
Subject: Re: STABB 1603-1701
Date: Wed, 02 Feb 2005 00:02:22 -0000
In-Reply-To: <200502011735.j11HZbuA016512@nix.thauvin.net>

Joy,

Congratulations! You have done very well for a Newbie to get
back that far and so fast! I have been looking for a few years
now and have been stuck at 1742 for at least the last five.
This is because you can't really rely on parish registers
further back than the eighteenth century. Apart from the fact
that you need to go down to Devon to look at quite a few of them
- the ones that *are* available are missing, decayed or simply
do not give enough information to identify a particular person,
e.g. they don't give the mother's name as was discussed recently
on this list.

However, you may be lucky and find a Will or a Deed or a Church
Wardens Account or Manor Court record that mentions your family
members . . . but you would need to be fairly lucky to find one
where it is absolutely clear which one of the several John or
William Stabb's it is referring to. Finding a will or a deed
also implies that the family would need to be reasonably well
off. And most of our ancestors weren't.

Have you tried the A2A searches at

http://www.a2a.org.uk/search/index.asp

they can be very useful for early records - in fact I just did a
search for stab OR stabb and found 55 records - I only looked at
a couple but they mention a John Stab - so you could be lucky?

You can also search for Wills at the PRO site

http://www.documentsonline.nationalarchives.gov.uk//

There are five wills for stab OR stabb there - they look as
though they could be your family - unfortunately not as far back
as you want to go. However, they could help to confirm your
researches so far.

However, as I said before, once you get back into the
seventeenth century, it's very difficult to ever be sure that
the person referred to is your particular John STABB.

I have resigned myself to probably never getting further back
than 1742 but concentrating on finding out as much as I can
about the intervening people. This is fascinating and leads you
down all kinds of historical paths.

I hope I am not being too pessimistic - if so, I am sure others
on the list will soon tell you!

Good luck!-------------------------------------------------
sandra windeatt in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
interested in all WINDEATT/WINGATE/WINGET variants
URL: http://www.windeatt.f2s.com

This thread:

• Re: STABB 1603-1701 by