The Mayor Of Southampton

We recently had a client that travelled to the UK to investigate some sites that had relevance to his family history. He had carried out fairly extensive and quite thorough research tracing his lineage back to the first settlers to travel to Virginia in the 1600s. He had reached a ‘brick wall’ with one of their immediate predecessors. The individual in question was a successful trader and had become the Mayor of Southampton, Edward Barlow.

Our client was trying to establish a link to other branches of the family he believed to be from Lancashire. He wrote to me, ‘There are a lot of resources like Ancestry that provide good information, but is very uneven with accuracy…word on the net says that the Isle of Wight ancestors are connected to the Lancashire ancestors, but I cannot make that connection’. We were commissioned to find that link.

Our client had done all the right things and done them well. He had amassed a solid database that took him a long way back to the 16th Century, but in the later 1500s the data had let him down and there was no clear pathway to be found. It has to be emphasised that when you are looking at historical sources, there will be occasions when, for a whole variety of reasons, there simply is no information to find. Assumptions can, and often are, made with empirical information that may prove to be correct, but there is no guarantee.

So, we went over all the data that the client had. We then narrowed down our own search to a much more focused timeline. We went through everything, again, in detail. We widened the search outwards once more to include new sources (both primary and secondary). Nothing came up.

Then, when we applied the rubric that the ‘established’ information could possibly be incorrect for some of the chain. We double-checked everything with this in mind.

In this case, it transpired that there was a commonly held and agreed date of birth for Edward Barlow. That date of 1560 was published in books and showed up on a number of websites and had been added to a good many genealogy trees on a variety of genealogy websites. However, we found that there did not seem to be any direct evidence for this. In fact, it very much appeared that one of the respected historians who had done such a good job of documenting the Virginia settlements had potentially jumped to the wrong conclusion, and every other source had just copied that.

I contacted the client stating, ‘I don’t think the reference that seems common for William being Edward’s father is backed by any evidence. The reference you make (and others) seems to me to be based on Dale’s supposition about Sir Walter Raleigh and Roanoke etc – looks like a bit of confirmation bias to me. So, I went through the evidence that there is (marriage, kids, etc). The timeline seems to make more sense if Edward was not born in 1560’.

We had found our pivot point.

We started anew and we discovered the evidence for an alternate timeline and everything began to fall into place. On the basis of this, we discovered some obscure, but solid research that suggested new familial links and established a basis for connecting the line to the family in Lancashire. One of the mainstays of this was that Edward Barlow’s parentage became much clearer.