Started the Pemberton Surname Research Blog

Today I started the Pemberton Surname Research blog here: http://pembertonsurname.blogspot.com/

Decisions about Research

I have been away from this for a month and got back to it today at the Genealogical Library in Salt Lake City. In reviewing my data, I see the following in regard to the three sets of George son of George:

1. The George Pemberton, baptised in Marbury, 13 Feb 1685, shows a mother Alice, not Sarah. If I sort the thousands of names I have into families, I see this George and Alice had several children (her name appears with all these) between 1685 & 1700. The oldest child is George so this cannot be my family, even if there was a prior marriage. If George had a wife before Alice, and named a son George and he was still living, they would not have named one of Alice's sons George. If Alice's George died and was replaced by a son of a second wife (who would have to be Sarah), the earliest possible birth is 1702 which would make George 16 when he had his first child in Virginia. It just doesn't work.

2. The George christened 30 Sept 1661 at St Mary's in Chester, has only one sibling, Thomas, christened 13 Feb 1662, four and a half months later.

3. The George christened 3 May 1640 at St Oswald's in Chester, has four siblings, John, Hester, Elizabeth and Anna, christened in 1642, 1643, 1644, and 1646. This George is too old to be our George II but he could be our George I. (The scrapbook says George II named his daughters Ann, Judith and Sarah.) However, there is a George Pemberton fathering a family in this same parish a generation later with two children Martha and William christened in 1666 and 1668.

4. There are 17 George baptisms/christenings in the parish records of Cheshire between the earliest in 1596 and 1751. One third of these have no father information, one forth of them have a George father. Only one other christian name occurs more than once among these George christenings: Joseph (occurs twice).

Searching Perogative Court of Cantebury (PCC) Wills

At the Salt Lake City Genealogical Library today, looking for George Pemberton wills 1383 - 1857. Looked through films 0091811 and 0091812 and found Pemberton wills for Roger, 1713? (approx), Francis 1715, Edward 1717, Edward 1717, Mary 1718, Thomas 1719, and John 1719. On film 0091810 John 1703, Carolus Middleton 1705, Thomas Pemberton 1705 (which will I pulled and read - 7 pages wife Martha, location Northampton and places east of there), and Maria 1705. Ended at that point.

Registered Pemberton Surname for a One-Name Study

I joined the Guild of One-Name Studies a couple weeks ago and today took the plunge to register Pemberton and formalise what I had already started - the compilation of all the family history and genealogical data available relating to people with the Pemberton Surname. Luckily, there is no imposed deadline as to when this has to be completed.

My motivation is two-fold: first, I enjoy this sort of work, and extracting data in bulk somehow makes more sense to me than looking for one at a time (maybe a symptom of a vocational disease I contracted years ago), and second, and more important; I have been deeply impressed as I have researched the name and particularly as I have met distant cousins in England, with the kind of people they always seem to be: down to earth, honest, independent, driven by principle more than convenience, and religious. I think it can be a wonderful blessing to thousands of Pemberton, many yet unborn, to know what kind of people they come from and to understand the feelings that course through their hearts as they deal with the vicissitudes of life.