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.)

Is he albino, Anne?

Nope. He's got greeny-gold eyes.

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.)

Well, according to wikipedia, Finland didn't require hereditary surnames until 1921, and there were a bunch of regions that didn't use them before that. So it could just be that they had different names.