Being an archivist is often a bit like being a detective … but we generally don’t find bad guys or solve crime. Instead, I like to think that we give people their identities and tell their stories. I have recently had the absolute pleasure of discovering the identity of a bunch of long-dead folk … and I can only thank the parents who decided to name their child Hephzibah rather than Mary, Elizabeth, or Sarah, just as examples.
A newly purchased collection consisted of five seemingly unrelated documents all grouped together under a single creator, Elizabeth Hall. I started digging without a huge amount of hope because I know that sadly, women’s identities are often lost. But Elizabeth Hall proudly signed her name to and dated a commonplace book, so we had something (although not much—commonplace books rarely tell you much about the creator). Happily, at the back of her volume (which is delightfully illustrated), she included a list of place names. Armed with the volume, a survey map in the collection, and google maps, I figured out that Elizabeth was referencing towns in the Leicestershire region of England.
I looked through the material again for other creators and I saw, in small text, on a very religious document, the name John Hall (those with eagle eyes will see that I read incorrectly!). John Hall could, of course, be a father, a husband, a son, an uncle or a grandfather, etc. And my God, how many John Halls were there in the 1780s? Answer: 1 BILLION! But I took a chance and I googled “John Hall” minister (the document, at first glance, looked like a sermon) and Leicestershire. The first result was a biography of John Hall, a lay minister in Tonge, born in 1732 and dying in 1813. It certainly seemed too good to be true, but I took those birth and death dates, and I dumped them in Ancestry along with Elizabeth as a daughter. Lo and behold, it turns out, a John Hall (1732-1813) had a daughter named Elizabeth.
I absolutely knew I did not have enough data to be convinced … but I was feeling quite smug. I showed my colleague the delights of my collection and my discoveries only to have her point out that the signature “John Hall” was actually “John Hallam.” Humph! Back to the drawing board! BUT NOT! Because I read the web page about John Hall again more carefully, and noticed that he had a brother-in-law called John Hallam. When I added Hallam to ancestry, I found a different John Hall (1733-1813) who married Hephzibah Hallam (1740-1820) and who had a daughter named Elizabeth (1770-1852).
It was time to move on to the other documents to see what else I could learn. I am sorry to say that I have not been able to find any connection between the Halls or Hallams and the Alton Grange Farm for which there is a survey map … my best guess is that John Hall (a farmer and lay minister) may have worked on the farm.
Similarly, I cannot figure out how the family connects to a recipe book for inks and sealing wax. I can make a wild speculation that our John Hallam is the John Hallam who worked as the Book Steward for the Primitive Methodist Magazine, and perhaps used our recipe book (containing “a receipt for Gilding Ribbons in a common Letter Press”) to print the magazine. That being said, John Hallam, the book steward, was working in the early 1840s, and the recipe book dates from 1785 to 1786, so that connection seems incredibly thin.
John Hallam is still a mystery to me … I am guessing that there were many John Hallams, all living around the same time and in the same area, and I have never found a date connected to the John Hallam who would logically be the brother-in-law to John Hall. I have found a John Hallam mentioned in a published volume of letters of John Wesley in which Wesley describes Hallam, in 1773, as “a good man, but a queer one.” Is this the same John Hallam as the one active in the 1840s and working for Primitive Methodist Magazine? There is a record of yet another John Hallam, a reverend born in about 1839 and memorialized in The Primitive Methodist Leader in 1913 with an obituary indicating that his father was a “diligent minister” and his mother was “a gifted preacher of the divine Word.” I am not even certain that all three of these John Hallams are from the same family, but their connection to Wesley and the Primitive Methodists makes me think they are.
The last item in the collection, and the last one that I looked at, the diary from 1818, proved to be the key … or should I say that Hephzibah proved to be the key to making me 100% certain that I had the correct family! The author, presumably a young woman in 1818, wrote about her family and her world from June to November. I was utterly delighted when I saw a reference to her aunt, Hephzibah. Then, because the writer was incredibly formal, she wrote of visits from Sarah, Mary, and Hephzibah Bosworth, daughters of our very same Elizabeth Hall who married Thomas Bosworth in 1797. She also mentioned Mr. Joyce and Mr. Shakspear, husbands of Elizabeth’s sisters Mary and, yes, you have guessed, Hephzibah; and Mr. and Mrs. Hallam. The diarist described visiting preachers, locations where her father preached, her health, her attendance at school, visitors to her home, and activities on the farm.
My first thought was that the diarist must be the daughter of John Hallam, brother to Hephzibah Hallam Hall; but with consideration, it seems unlikely that the diarist, a school-aged woman in 1818, would be the daughter of someone active in the 1770s and 1780s. Once I realized that every single generation of this family had their own Hephzibah, it became clear that any number of Hephzibahs could be this woman’s aunt.
There are still a huge number of unknowns–I don’t know much about Elizabeth or the author of the diary … but they are alive and well in my mind and I have enjoyed getting to know them as much as I can. Putting together the family tree created a framework for me, but the sermon-type document, the commonplace book, and the diary, allowed me to see the people, and especially the women, in this family. Based on the diary, I know that the Halls, Hallams, and the Bosworths were tightly knit … aunts and probably cousins were part of nearly every day of the author’s life. And I know that the diarist seemed to live a peaceful and happy life, filled with friends, family, and faith, with very little drama to report.
Come explore the Hall and Hallam family papers, 1785-1818 and see if you can discover more … I would love to give the Hephzibahs, Elizabeths, and Johns more of an identity!
Unique at Penn 