EVESLEY, Tring, late 18th century
July 2001
James
Norris (jamalfnor @t
barclays.net) of Thetford, Norfolk says that John
and Ann Eversley were the declared parents
of John and Sarah
Eversley, both christened at Tring
on the same day in 1775. The younger John
and his sister settled in Great Stanmore and
raised families. Sarah married Thomas Norris, my great great great grandfather,
in 1795 at St John The Evangelist Great Stanmore
Middlesex.
I have studied the entire catalogue of Eversleys
on the IGI but cannot find the marriage of John
and Ann. Nor are they in the printed
marriage registers at Hertford. But an apparently unrelated John Eversley married Elizabeth
Wright at Ivinghoe, just over the
border in Buckinghamshire, in 1768. Perhaps
Chris can throw some light on this, in the knowledge that the Eversley clan were always a small and diminishing
contingent spread over Hertfordshire and neighbouring counties in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries.
The name Eversley is not common in the area and it is not impossible that the John who married in nearby Ivinghoe in 1768 was the father of the John and Sarah who were christened in Tring in 1775. If so there are a number of possibilities:
His first wife Elizabeth died and he remarried Ann - but the marriage has not been indexed or indexed incorrectly. Check the burial registers of Ivinghoe and Tring to see if/when Elizabeth died. [Have you checked the Allan index at HALS?]
As above, but he did not formally marry Ann. If Elizabeth died leaving young children (check baptismal registers) Ann may have been a younger unmarried sister who move in to look after the children ... Marriage would have been against church law - but in some cases the couple would have left the area specifically to marry in an area where the reasons for objection were not known.
Elizabeth was actually Elizabeth Ann - or also known as Ann - probably no way of checking. However double names not common at that date.
The register is in error - check the Bishop's Transcripts - but they may simply repeat the error. Alternately, if you have been relying on indexes without checking the registers (many spurious family trees are due to failure to check details), you may have been caught out by one of the many errors in the indexes.
You don't say whether John was from Ivinghoe or elsewhere when he married Elizabeth. (The register should make this clear). If appropriate you may be able to check the years he was in Ivinghoe/Tring during the intervening years from any surviving parish records such as rate books, militia lists etc., depending on what has survived.
August 2001
James Norris (jamalfnor @t barclays.net) replied: Thanks for your valuable analysis. I have since found on the IGI an Elizabeth Eversly christened at Tring in 1779 - the daughter of John Eversly and Elizabeth - and that could upset calculations based on an early death of Elizabeth. I will be visiting the Hertford Record Office in August to see whether I can clear up this and other problems in the primary sources. I know only too well how misleading the IGI can be to the unwary.
You will not need reminding that the spelling does not seriously matter, because the few Eversleys had their names spelt in various ways throughout their quite brief appearance in registers, even within the same family. A daughter of my Stanmore Sarah's brother John was registered as Sophia Iversley in 1811, and her brothers and sisters appeared variously as Eversly and Eversley.
I wonder what John and Elizabeth Eversly were doing between the marriage in 1768 and the baptism of Elizabeth in 1779 (assuming Elizabeth junior was an infant ...). 10 years is a long gap before a first child is born.
James Norris (jamalfnor @t barclays.net) reported: On a visit to the Society of Genealogists last Saturday I found in Allen's Marriages that the John Eversley who married Elizabeth Wright at Ivinghoe in January 1768 had his banns read at Tring, which suggests that he was the John who later had at least two children baptised there, born from his union with Ann(?). Notice that I only say "suggests" and "union". I have no evidence of a marriage so far. My research at Hertford Record Office later this month may throw some light on that.
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