An update on my work and the Manning Family

I want to report that I have had to revise some of the information from my work [already!] on our family. Some of the relationships that I [and many others on Ancestry] have adopted, I find with some deeper digging that I sometimes have to backtrack and leave parents as unknown at this time. An example of that recently has been with the Hull and Mundy families. It makes enormous sense to me that in a very small frontier settlement like Piscataway, NJ, that families would marry those nearby, so throughout time people have declared Samuel Hull, Jr.'s wife a Mundy. But that has been debunked pretty thoroughly by recent researchers. This was a little discouraging to me because I was ready to run with the "eccentric" Nicholas Mundy who might have been an indentured servant in Barbados and then was one of the earliest of Piscataway settlers. But a good story is not as important as getting the record as straight as one can. Something similar occurred with Jeffrey Manning: his New England ties were going to make some good reading, but someone recently published an article that had me deleting a few interesting folks and adding in some that we know virtually nothing about. I guess the gist of all this is to say that I am trying hard to stop perpetuating bad genealogy, and that I am not afraid to admit mistakes even when it hurts.

A Updated Clip from the South Pope Family Tree

Above is an updated clip from the South Pope Family Tree to show you how the Manning family ties in and where we are heading toward Edmund South and Johanna Hull

Hawstead, Suffolk, England 

I think we are beginning to see a pattern for early parish churches.

Jeffrey Manning (1638-1692) 8xggf

Most Ancestry.com family trees in the past have had Jeffrey Manning with some rather interesting roots in New England, but a 2012 article in The American Genealogist provides evidence of his origins in Hawstead, Suffolk, England instead. At any rate, Jeffrey is discussed in the Monette Early Settlers of ye Plantations of Piscataway and Woodbridge books as one of the very early settlers in Piscataway, NJ, coming at least as early as 1673 when his name appeared on a Dutch list of men who swore an oath of allegiance to Holland during that brief time when Holland re-occupied New Jersey. In 1675 he was given a patent from the Proprietors for his first 95 acres. Jeffrey had several surveys for land in Piscataway, and Monette records that he came right after the first eight settlers, and that he was a court official in the earliest County Court of Middlesex County in 1683. An 1889 history of the first Baptist church in Piscataway (one of the earliest Baptist churches in America) has a section on the Manning family and calls Jeffrey one of the three commissioners tasked to lay out the land grants in the township. This book states that “From the beginning of pioneer settlements in East Jersey, the Mannings have always been identified with the organization of Baptist churches.”(115)  Jeffrey died in Piscataway in 1692. Jeffrey’s wife was Hepzibah Andrews (1640-1692) 8xggm who was born in Hingham, MA to Joseph Andrews (1597-1680) 9xggf and his wife Elizabeth. Jeffrey and Hepzibah Andrews Manning had six children, including Mary Manning who married Samuel Hull Sr. from the last section. 

Mary Manning (1663-1692) 7xggm

Mary was born in Piscataway in 1663 to Jeffrey and Hepzibah Manning, early settlers along with her husband Samuel Hull, Sr. Listed in Monette’s copy of Piscataway marriages, her marriage to Samuel Hull, Sr. is dated 1677 bore her first child, Samuel Hull, Jr. about a year later. They would have ten children. There are many respected sources for these basic facts, like a record in the AGBI, American Marriages before 1699, Colonial Families of the USA 1607-1775, and New England Marriage Records 1560-1900. But like most women of her time, the accomplishments of raising a family were not considered noteworthy.

Resources

https://archive.org/details/historyoffirstba00drak  online version of History of the First Baptist Church of Piscataway by George Brown Drake, 1889.

https://books.google.com/books?id=9W4bAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA805&dq=jeffrey+manning+piscataway&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjvlubA0MbaAhUHsFQKHWUpC8cQ6AEIKTAA#v=onepage&q=jeffrey%20manning%20piscataway&f=false  online version of The Genealogical and Biographical History of the Manning Families of New England by William Henry Manning, 1902.

https://books.google.com/books?id=a5QyAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA41&dq=jeffrey+manning+piscataway&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjvlubA0MbaAhUHsFQKHWUpC8cQ6AEIQzAF#v=onepage&q=jeffrey%20manning%20piscataway&f=false online version of The New York Genealogical and Biographical Record, Vol. 29-30 1898.

I continue to use information from First Settlers of ye plantations of Piscataway and Woodbridge, olde east New Jersey, 1664-1714 by Orra Eugene Monette published in the early 1930s.