LNAB MAY be different than profile

Question

I'm noodling through Connecticut unsourced profiles, whiling away morning coffee attempting to source a few. Hannah Daines is one of those. Could find nothing in americanancestors or in family search. Ancestry gave me a Hannah Dean/Deans in Barbour. Same birthdate and same parents, different town and county. same death month and day, but one year later (1745 v. 1746/7 in Barbour), but different town, same county. Since profile is unsourced, I'm pretty certain I've got enough data points to assure Deans and Daines are one and the same person.

My inclination is to add Dean/Deans as alternative last names, particularly as the profile manager's last name is "Dains." I also plan on contacting the PM to let them know what I have discovered.

Do you agree with this approach?

Comments

What sort of data source are you looking at?

Answer 1

I've seen Dane and Dean as interchangeable spellings in other early New England records, so it is entirely credible that Deans and Daines are the same name.

Since the Barbour Collection of Connecticut Vital Records doesn't distinguish between Dean and Deans for town of Windham records, do include those spellings as "other last names" in her profile. During the same time period, the Barbour Collection records for the town of Canterbury (which is adjacent to Scotland, the town formed from the part of Windham where this woman appears to have lived) combine the spellings "DEAN - DEANS, DAINS, DEAINS, DEANE" as the same name, which confirms that the spellings were interchangeable. The choice of LNAB doesn't matter as much as ensuring that the alternative spellings are recorded, but if her birth was recorded as "Deans" or "Dean," then "Deans" looks like a good choice for the LNAB spelling.

I think I've seen some records on Ancestry for the church in the Scotland society of Windham -- you may find some additional records there.

I note that there are multiple women named Hannah Deans/etc. in the Barbour Collection records during this approximate time period. In situations like that, it's easy to assign records to the wrong person (goodness knows I've done that!).  To help you or others audit your assumptions in the future, instead of giving a single records citation to support both her both and death, please spell out exactly what each record says about her:

• DEAN - DEANS, Hannah, d. Ebenezer & Mercy, b. Aug. 9, 1722
• DEAN - DEANS, Hannah, d. Feb. 18, 1746/7

Canterbury shows no birth of a Hannah of similar age, but there are some other records that lead me to see a potential for confusion, including:

• DEAN - DEANS, DAINS, DEAINS, DEANE, Hannah, d. Eben[eze]r & Mary, b. Sept. 28, 1748
• DEAN - DEANS, DAINS, DEAINS, DEANE, Hannah, m. Jonathan T[h]ompson, Jan. 10, 1748/9

Comments

PS - You say you couldn't find this person in AmericanAncestors. You may be including too many search terms in your searches there. Many of their records (I think this includes the Barbour Collection) aren't indexed by data fields like date or location. If you include those items in your search, you will fail to see a lot of relevant results.

I found this person at AmericanAncestors by searching on just her name, then filtering the results -- first to Vital Records and next to the Barbour Collection.

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I agree in this case of leaving the Dains as LNAB, until such time as an actual record is looked at (which of course no one is likely to do). Put the alternate spellings in the OtherLN

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Ellen, I should have been clearer. I did not find Hannah Dean/Deans when I searched the name Hannah Daines. After I found her by Dean in ancestry, I searched americanancestors again using Dean as the surname, and found the two records you show.

In this case, I was trying to find a source that matched the data in the existing unsourced profile, which I believe I did, sufficiently to say they matched the profile. I did not consider that perhaps the entire profile was incorrect. There are several more unsourced Dains from the same time period (likely brothers and sisters), and as I look for sources for those, I think we'll find further verification of Hannah's data.

Interestingly, the Hannah Daines search in americanancestors with only "Connecticut" as a search parameter, although most results were Downes or Dunk, I did find the following in the Barbour Collection Norwich vital records (Norwich being the ascribed location in the orginal profile) :

Abell Deens & Mercy Polley were married to Each other January 28th, 1734/5 by me Henry Willes Paft[r] of ye fecond C[hh] in norwich. Entred January 14th 1735/6. (Barbour, Norwich-V1, p. 165)

Hannah Deens Daughter of Abell & Mercy was born Janu[ry] 5th 1735.

Lucie Deens ye Daughter of Abell Deens and his wife marcy was born ye 7th of July 1738.

Jemima ye daughter of Abel Deens and of his wife Marcy was born may 21st 1740. (Ibid., page 166.)

As you said, this record is roughly the same time frame and the actual location in the profile, so it could cause potential confusion. However, Hannah's two sisters, Lucie and Jemima, do not appear as siblings in Hannah Daines' profile, so I think it is acceptable to cross Hannah Deens of Norwich off our list.

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Thank you all for your kind input. As a relative newbie, there remains so much for me to learn from you all, and I truly appreciate your guidance.

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Ah, I see what you mean about not being able to find her when you search on Daines (FWIW, it also doesn't work to search on Dains). Frustrating!

When you mentioned Norwich, I was reminded that there's a record in Windham for "Hannah, of Norwich, m. Henry Dewitt, [     }, 1772". Glad to see that the 1772 date is outside the range for this profile. Still, it's worth remembering that the data in an unsourced profile isn't necessarily valid. The sources you found do confirm that people named Ebenezer had a daughter Hannah in Windham in 1722 and that a Hannah died in Windham in 1747, but the records alone don't confirm that the Hannah who died in 1747 is the same one who was born in 1722.