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Very interesting to read these replies - thankyou. I'm glad I'm not the only one who struggles to keep things under control! I'm using Family Tree Maker and Ancestry to compile the tree and save references to documents. I also print out a lot of the census returns etc for future reference as I find it easier to use hard copy than squint at a screen. My difficulties lie with deciding how to tackle the job: whether to keep focused on each person in one line, or take up new information such as a wife's maiden name and start to look at that as well. I suppose it's whether to go vertically up one line of the tree, or horizontally across each generation. I suspect the former is the better approach, but I'm such a butterfly that the lure of the new and intriguing will always divert me. The keey must be adequate note keeping and I'm still figuring out how best to do that.
Hadn't heard of RootsMagic - must look at that.

I'm getting absorbed in family history research again after a longish break. I'm curious to know how others work as the number of names and lines increases - do you focus  on one line at a time? What do you do, for example, when a marriage introduces a new surname  - start looking at that as well or leave it for later? I'm finding it hard to stay focused  -I get intrigued by new information, eg a rare surname,  someone from a different area of the country - and go off at a tangent  -then can't remember where I was up to  I also need to be more diligent about making notes and referencing documents immediately- there's rather too much back-tracking and re-checking at the moment. I'd be interested to hear how others deal with an increasingly complex tree and how you keep notes of material that you may want to come back to. 

Hi, welcome to RootsChat 

Assuming that the baptism took place in an Anglican chrch, at that date, Ryde was not a separate parish, but a chapelry of Newchurch. 

Have you any reason to think that Mary's parents were non-conformist?  Did either of them come from the Isle of Wight that you know of?

Nell

Hi Nell. The Westmoreland entry is for the parish church, and all later events in the family are C of E, so probably not non-conformist. I'm wondering if someone made an error in a transcription at some point, maybe conflating 2 quite separate events, and it's been repeated in later indexes. The 2 variant entries appear on the IGI and on Ancestry - if you put Margaret Langhorn, b 1795 into the latter, you get 2 entries for Ryde, one for Westmoreland as the first 3 results. The family are from Cumbria, all Margaret's siblings were born there and she married there, so Ryde does seem very unlikely, as does a total coincidence of names and dates, given that it's not a common surname. I was hoping that someone might be able to do a physical check to be absolutely sure, but if there was no church in Ryde at the time, that perhaps confirms an error.