Page 353 - Just another English family (Sep 2019)

academic reputation that remains secure. My mission in writing up the family history was partly to ensure that other less heralded Soothills would also see the light of day but, despite this personal mission, my eye was quickly drawn to any entry which included William Edward’s name.
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Yes, in the index to the 1871 census provided by the Ancestry search, ‘William Edward Soothill’ was listed with parents as ‘William, Margret’. That was not a surprise for his mother, Margaret, was sometimes shown as ‘Margret’ and sometimes as ‘Margaret’. I recognised that eventually I would have to find out the birth name, so I could note which was the variant from the birth name, but that was not the task of the day.
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William Edward’s birth was shown as ‘abt 1861’ – Ancestry records show the likely birth year while 1837Online, the other source of records, tend to give the stated age at the appropriate census. Anyway, that seemed right for he was born in 1861 and now would be aged 10 years. His birthplace was shown as Halifax, Yorkshire, England, and he was shown as still living in Halifax with is parents. Certainly the index entry showed no discrepancies from what I already knew. Among the six entries of ‘William Soothill’, his entry stood out as revealing familiar territory.
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But what’s this as I went through the other ‘William Soothill’ entries? There is first a ‘William Soothill’ who is married to ‘Margret’ born about 1820 in Galway, Ireland, and now living in Hulme, Lancashire. This is a person I had not come across before. I never knew before that we had a Soothill who had been born in Ireland. The next entry made my eyes bulge even more, for the Irish ‘William and Margret’ (I later discovered that Margret had been born in Galway, Ireland, in around 1821) had also had a baby boy in 1861 that they had named as ‘William’. This William, however, was born in Manchester, Lancashire, England’, so immediately dispelling the notion that this was a mistaken double entry for William Edward Soothill. The next William entry showed the father half of William Edward’s parentage. William Soothill – the father of William Edward – was born in Halifax around 1836.
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