And just another thought -- do you have a male-line descendant of Robert who could do YDNA testing?
I'm in the process of having my uncle do this for our Cornwall surname Hill (which may or may not
have been my gr-grfather's real surname).
My interest is in finding out what the heck our ancestral male-line surname really is. The project's
interest is in getting some pedigreed English DNA into the project (if such ours is), hopefully for the
benefit of at least some of the Hill waifs and strays in the US, who have no other way of identifying
their English origins before the arrival in the new world, and sometimes even before the US Civil War
because of lost and destroyed records, orphaned children, etc.
These are the current results in the Parsons surname project associated with the company I am using
for my families:
http://www.worldfamilies.net/surnames/parsons/resultsYou might find a match there. If Robert's family in the US is accounted for in your own records, you
might not end up with matches in the US (which wouldn't help much anyway unless they had traced
back to England), but there might someday be a match with someone with a verified English ancestor.
That's what the benefit to the project of my uncle's cheek scrapings will be, if we're lucky: we are all in
Canada, but the immigration was only a century ago, so I can trace to a marriage in Cornwall c1815.
So anyone in the US who matched with my family's DNA would have the connection to Cornwall established.
You might strike it similarly lucky.
edit - the only problem is, in 1841, the John who seems to be the father of Robert (in Lawhitton with
wife Mary and children John and Francis) is identified as not born in Cornwall ... and seems to be gone
by the 1851 census when his place of birth would be given. Ditto for the spare Mary Parsons in the
1841 household (a sister or widowed sister-in-law maybe?) also shown as not born in county, and for
a Christopher Parsons and wife Mary in Lawhitton in 1841 -- not born in county and not present in 1851.
Rats, eh?
There is one more older Parsons couple in Lawhitton in 1841 and 1851: Samuel and wife Susanna.
He says born in Lawhitton c1807, in 1851, but there is no such birth. However, there is a birth in Egloskerry
(again just a couple of miles in the other direction from Launceston) in 1805, to John and Elizabeth.
If he were younger brother to John father of Robert, it could be that he was born after that couple
relocated to Cornwall, with the older children, John and Christopher, born elsewhere. That would make
John the father of Robert a "John Jr" as in the first marriage in my post above.
Hang on, I didn't look far enough. I was looking for baptisms, but FamilySearch has found me the
censuses for 1861 (in Lawhitton) and 1871 (in St Giles, Devon) for Christopher 1785/6, shown as
born in St Giles in the Heath, Devon. His son Thomas 1823/6 also states born in St Giles in the Heath
in later censuses, and in fact there are absolute gazillions of Parsons-s in the censuses born there,
some living in Cornwall in Launceston, i..e a couple of miles from Lawhitton.
In fact, there are John and Mary in Launceston in 1851: he is a farmer born St Giles, Devon; Mary was
born South Petherwin, Cornwall. And there is another senior St Giles Parsons in Launceston as well
in 1851: Richard, 1789, late farmer, wife Elizabeth born Plymouth, and children.
So if all these hypotheses were correct, that would be where Robert's Parsons family came from, at least
in the late 1700s. If they were like my Hills, whether they really came from Devon or Cornwall
would be an open question still.
... Oh duh. St Giles on the Heath is itself about 5 miles north and slightly east of Launceston. So we
aren't actually talking about much of a "relocation"! All of the place names I've mentioned here are
within a 5-mile or less radius of Launceston.
