Timelies all!

Went to the Baltimore Book Festival. Saw some writers I know on panels. Didn't buy any books. (Too many of the used book sellers had the books in sections by type, but otherwise all haphazard. I know I'm being anal about this, but put the books in alphabetical order, dammit!)

I feel like shit and have managed to convince myself that I either have the flu or West Nile.

Hil, if you're serious... Malcolm Cornforth emigrated to the US from England in 1963, and I'd really like to know who/where he was before he came here. Cornforth seems to be an unusual name. He was almost certainly my biological father. All I know about him is, he was an engineer of some type, he liked to race cars, and he was married to a woman named Shirley.

There isn't that much information available online from after the 1940s or so, because of privacy concerns. I checked a database of births in England, and found people named Malcolm Cornforth born in 1931, 1943, 1944, and 1954. All of them born in places that end in -shire, if that means anything.

Oh! Malcolm W Cornforth married Shirley Wood in 1964 in Yorkshire North Riding. But you said he came to the US in 1963.

Hil, do you know anything about Jews in colonial America? I have an ancestor named Moses David Levi, who was born ca. 1728 in Philadelphia, and converted to Christianity in 1759. Most of what I know about him is from a book about the church he was converted to, which kept really detailed records (http://books.google.com/books?id=ThgVAAAAYAAJ&dq=history+of+the+Goshenhoppen+Reformed+charge,+Montgomery+County&source=gbs_navlinks_s). He married a woman with a German name and the community he lived in seems to have been very German, but my limited research on pre-Revolutionary Jews suggests they were mostly Sephardim.

Hil, do you know anything about Jews in colonial America?

They were mostly Sephardim, mostly descended from people who had fled the Inquisition and moved to Amsterdam, but there were some others, too.

A lot of British records are online, and generally indexed pretty well.

The question is Samuel Barrett Moulton Barrett--did he have kids with a Jamaican black woman, and if so, what were their names?

The curiosity is--clearly the official documents don't support their position or they'd be wearing the T shirts--how could I find out about shenanigans? I guess I can't eliminate them, but still.

I'm sure the best our Moultons could do would be to have been being owned.

I just randomly looked up my biological grandfather on Wikipedia, and am irrationally annoyed that his fourth wife is listed as spouse instead of my grandmother. (She was his wife at the time he died, and he may have been married to her longer, but still. My Nana was the one who raised all his kids, damnit. Two of whom are also missing from the entry.)

The question is Samuel Barrett Moulton Barrett--did he have kids with a Jamaican black woman, and if so, what were their names?

The curiosity is--clearly the official documents don't support their position or they'd be wearing the T shirts--how could I find out about shenanigans? I guess I can't eliminate them, but still.

I'm sure the best our Moultons could do would be to have been being owned.

I'm not sure. There are a bunch of slave registers from Jamaica that are searchable at ancestry.com, but without knowing first names, I wouldn't know how to figure out which people to look at. There are a lot of slaves listed as belonging to Samuel Moulton Barrett, and some listings where the slaves have the last name Moulton and the owner is listed as just Samuel Barrett, so there is information there, if you know what to look for.

Hil, if you don't mind looking up some more, I have a question about one of my great grandfathers. Isaac Valli (1878-1947) was born in Finland and came to the US around 1900. His father's name was Jacob Sorkala Eliasson (1846-1931), who also immigrated to the US around then. Apparently Issac was legitimate, so I've been wondering--why the name change? My theory is that he had another family as "Isaac Eliasson," but I'm not sure how to find out. (The family story is that he only came home long enough to get great grandma pregnant, so it seems possible.)