Thursday, December 10, 2009

Index to Unindexed Names in Hinshaw's Quaker Encyclopedia

William Wade Hinshaw's incredible Encyclopedia of American Quaker Genealogy project has been a mainstay for years for quaker records research. I recently purchased the entire set of volumes on a CD. Included on the CD was a little file called names.txt which turned out to be a list of names that were never included in indexes. For the most part, these were names that appeared on what I would call "leaves" of the usual pages. For example, page 822 of Volume V has leaves numbered 822a, 822b, etc. Many of these unindexed names were my progenitors so I took the opportunity to create an index of these 3,652 names and publish them here.

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

A Breakthrough in My Search For My Pemberton's

Since I copied my genealogy from the records of Percy Pemberton Brown back in the 1960's, I had supposed that his record of one George X Pemberton and Judith Garth as the parents of our Isaiah Pemberton, b. abt 1722, was correct. In the fall of 2009, I am serving as a missionary volunteer on a Church Farm in Norfolk, UK, and am determined to see if I could get my Pemberton line over the pond. In my searching, I came across a web site by one Daniel Buckley wherein he talks of this same George X and Judith and explores the findings of one Ernie L Pemberton who travelled to Barbados to search the archives there. The matter at issue was the often quoted finding that George X's father John was born in St John's Parish, Virginia. But Ernie found the identical record (about a dozen simultaneous matches) in St John's Parish, Barbados. It was clear that the Virginia record was in error: that someone had muddled the two St John's Parishes into one and completely mis-located this John and his children. The details of all this can be found here.

As I studied the Buckley web site I learned of an old handed-down scrapbook that had wonderful data on my Pemberton line. After checking through Daniel's work, I was convinced that it was very thorough and reliable. In the midst of all that, I learned that Daniel had recently passed away and, in a panic for fear of loss of access to his wonderful work, I copied his web site into mine at pembertonfamily.com so as to preserve it for myself. The original Buckley web site is still up today and can be seen here.