Reconstituting the Allsops of Tissington–progress

I’ve been making slow but steady progress on my project to reconstitute the Allsop family/ies of Tissington, Derbyshire, England. I’ve described the general method I used previously. It makes use of the wonderful charting and querying abilities of Family Historian software. I didn’t start out with the aim of putting them all together, I was only interested in my own tree. But as it turns out, my own tree accounts for the majority of them and having gone this far there’s no turning back!

Updated method

I made one slight modification to the method described. Instead of drawing shapes to link individuals who I think may be the same person, I started colour coding the boxes instead. It worked much better as I could still see who belonged where even if the charts moved about as I merged people.

Progress

I’ve now identified two main family groups of Allsops. One group descends from a John Allsop from Kniveton who married a Tissington bride in 1833 and had some children in Tissington. This smaller tree is below. Note the use of blue and red box outlines, along with placement of trees, so that I can easily see the people who I think are the same person, but don’t yet have sufficient evidence to merge.

The other much larger group, from which I descend, had been in Tissington from at least the 1600s.

There are also quite a few coloured boxes where want to be sure they really are the same person in here.

Work to be done

I still have a number of extra individuals to sort out. I’ve shifted them so they all sit on one part of the chart sheet. I’ve also added bars with years written on them, so that I can arrange them down the page placed roughly at their estimated birth years.

I’ve been doing more targeted searches for information about these people and have slowly been linking them in to the two main trees where I can. The source that is helping me the most for those born after 1837 is the GRO birth indexes, which now include mother’s maiden names.

I’m also planning to request some documents from the Derbyshire Record Office. There is one document in particular from their catalogue which looks like it will confirm the link I have pencilled in from the earlier to the later generations.