Page 313 - Just another English family (Sep 2019)

beyond the shores of England. Of course, the original Soothills may have come from abroad in the first place, but I am really posing that question in relation to the first Soothill going abroad after the clan had become settled in northern England, mainly in Yorkshire but also in Lancashire. One could speculate that Soothills might have been involved in the early crusades and so on. But I am trying to focus on those who actually made a home in foreign parts rather than those who went abroad to wage war or, more recently, went on holiday away from England.
Public records are, of course, crucial and one is reliant on this sort of evidence. In my estimation Seth Sothilll seems the best bet, but there are problems. Firstly, the name is not exactly the same and the documentary evidence is a bit sparse. The name being spelt a bit differently is not a fatal flaw, for we are going back in time to when phonetic spelling gives an approximation to a name which eventually became more fixed in spelling.
While the documentary evidence seems fairly sparse, the story is probably complex and I don’t want to go into detail here. Suffice to say at this point that I think that Seth Sothill was a Soothill, even though the evidence is more circumstantial than profound!
Seth, of course, goes back to a time before the various states of America could be considered as the ‘United States’. The next person I wish to present is the first Soothill listed in a United States census.
Who is Isaac?
Isaac Soothill is the only Soothill displayed in the U.S. 1840 census. He is shown as living in the township of New York. Isaac is an unusual name and the only one currently in my database is Isaac Soothill, born on 13 December 1837 in Halifax as the fourth child of Thomas (1802-?) and Elizabeth (née Mitchell) Soothill. Coming
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