Joan/Ann Marsham Drake Everard Sourcing Headache - Help

Question

I have reviewed a variety of sources to resolve this sad, sourceless profile, from the one source listed on the profile (that only lists conjecture of her husband to her son), to the Essex Records Office online archive, to Essex parish records hosted on familysearch and ancestry.com, the NEHGS online archives, to the Feet of Fines for Essex as published by The Essex Society for Archaeology and History, and I have had very little success in sourcing. I will continue to comb the Essex parish records. The Essex Records office holds a certified copy of the Will of Thomas Everard, but it is only available in person on Microfiche at their archives office, which purportedly is a primary source for the children of Joan/Ann Marsham Drake Everard. As I live in the US, I am unavailable to check this source in person. If anyone has any further ideas for sources, please let me know. 

Answer 1

Thanks Sarah for this research but I have the strong suspicion that the reason that you can't find anything is because she never existed under those names, and that we have two (or more) men named William Drake with a combined wife.

The Visitation of Norfolk, p. 197 (not always the best source but a good starting point), has Ann Marsham married to William Drake of Norwich

A chapter about the Drake family from Essex, by the esteemed late English genealogist Sir Anthony Wagner, in the book The Drake family of New Hampshire ... has a William Drake, married to Joan Merrylls; at the moment the William Drake Jr profile the son of William Drake Sr and Joan Ann Marsham is the one married to Joan Merrylls

I'm not sure where the second husband Thomas Everard fits into all this, and maybe finding him and his will that supposedly names all the children of William Drake and his wife Joan might be one avenue to follow.

Unfortunately tangles like this are still reasonably commonplace on WikiTree, particularly in the pre-1700/pre-1500 area and I don't have time to do more research, but I would definitely recommend that if the two Marsham profiles are merged that they are disconnected from the Essex Drake family and connected up to a William Drake of Norfolk profile, if that doesn't exist already.

Comments

Would an option be to set her name to Joan LNAB Unknown, and cancel the pending merge? Then the Ann Marsham profile could be detached from the Essex group and attached to the Norfolk group per your suggestion? I've marked the Joan Everard profile with unsourced, uncertain existence, and uncertain family templates - red flags galore.

And thank you so much for the assistance, I really appreciate it.

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Thanks Sarah, that sounds like a really good way or resolving the issue around that profile.

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The merge went through before I saw this response (ugh), but I've purged the profile of bad info and have disconnected it from the Marsham parents and left it attached to the Essex group. Now the challenge will be seeing where the actual Ann Marsham and William Drake pairing have gone off to and fixing that. I'm seeing a ton of entanglement and conflation in these family groups - but unfortunately since I lack the pre-1500 I can't really help on some of the older ones. But I shall try to figure this out.

Unknown-533026 is Joan's new ID

The disconnected parents (presumably the parents of the Ann Marsham in question) IDs are

Downes-270

Marsham-25

The locality for the parents is listed as Norfolk, which is approx. 285 mi away from Devon, which is the actual locality for many of the "Essex" Drakes that are mislabeled, so we'll have to see what's going on there as well across three localities.

Now please excuse me while I go beat my head against my keyboard.

Answer 2

This has no sources, but might give hints for further research 

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/180623132/joan-ann-drake

Comments

Thanks Marion, it would be interesting to know if the burial date can be confirmed and what name it is under. Otherwise I think it is probably just information gleaned from online family trees.

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Does this mean the spouse of William Drake jr is indeed Joan Drake?