[If you don’t see a navigation bar on the left then click here]
Very little has changed between the first and second editions. In the two years since the first edition I have received much positive feedback, and ran out of hardcopies to post out. The most serious errors were:
1. I had the wrong birth date for my father and one of my three nephews
2. I had linked in the Garcia family when they are in fact not related
3. Charles William Hall (an unrelated Hall) only married once
4. Serious errors in the Massy branch of the family tree; apart from many wrong names the first edition had two wrong marriages
5. Other serious errors in unrelated (McIntosh) families in the Gedcom file on the floppy included with the first edition.
The web hasn’t changed that much. I switched my search engine from Alta Vista to Northern light. Northern Light died so I switched to Google. There have been few good new web sites, some of the older ones have advanced and some have stayed the same. Three have advanced most. The LDS familysearch website has grown larger and less accurate as they get more submissions from individuals. Rootsweb has passed critical mass, two years ago the chance of encountering a like-minded genealogist on rootsweb was about 1% but now it’s passing 50%. The third is jamaicafamilysearch.com which is a real pest because it has a large pay-by-the-day members area which I haven’t yet accessed.
The gedcom file from the first edition of this book has appeared on the web in two places. Bill McPhail has VERY kindly put it onto his excellent website here. It has also appeared, through ancestry.com (of which I’m not a member) on rootsweb here. I sent the book to Donald Lindo and expect that much of the information in the gedcom is on the latest edition of his CD-ROM. The LDS library in Salt Lake City has a copy of the book but no other library does.
I have been in touch with many people since the first edition was written, the greatest advances have been in the descendants of George Alexander de Boile Massy and Ella Jane McPhail (b. 1861) and in the descendants of Susan Campbell and Robert Jackson (m. 1805).
The first
edition was printed on paper and had a floppy inside the back cover. The second
edition is posted on the web.
The chapter
‘A Holiday in New York’ is totally new. Appendices 6 (Jackson & Mahogany
Vale) and 7 (Parish Register Extracts) are totally new. The chapter ‘Maps’ has
been deleted for copyright reasons. The old Appendix ‘Pages from Parish
Registers’ and half of the Appendix ‘Unrelated Halls and Jacksons’ have gone,
absorbed into the new Appendix 7.
In the
chapter on Allegonda BOOM/HALL, I’ve added extra data on Boom and Jonas in
Curacao from the Dutch book on slavery “Vrij van
Slavernij”. I’ve mentioned of the marriage of John Edwards & Dorothy
Jonaz.
Thanks to
Nicholas Payne, I have much more information on the descendents of Robert
Jackson & Susan Campbell. This has gone in ‘Jacksons and Rawleighs’ and the
new Appendix 6. He includes a reference to the book “Memoir of
Fleeming Jenkin” by Robert Louis Stevenson. Fleeming Jenkin is a Jackson
descendent.
I’ve added
a fourth unrelated Hall family who owned Tryall estate in Jamaica.
I was sent
a ‘monumental inscription’ for the Patterson/Paterson family in Coldingham.
This lists all the siblings of George, and includes the note that George’s
brother William died in Jamaica, causing me some disturbance. It’s in the
chapter “The early Pattersons”. I’ve also included some of the Jamaican
Pattersons/Patersons in Appendix 7.
Since the
first edition I’ve found two new descendants so they’ve been added.
I’ve made
other minor changes, particularly to the source of information on the Horsfall
children.
Jeremy
White found a new copy of the family register with Angèle Vidal-Hall, extra
pages from this and from my (David Paterson’s) copy are included in Appendix 1.
Some copies
of the first edition are missing the printed version of Jessie Astwood’s
letters, now in Appendix 3.