Emma Siggins White's over-eagerness to appropriate all English Whites and aggrandize her husband's tree has all but obliterated the line of White of Somerset - which is NOT, or not closely, related to the Whites of Hampshire/Surrey.
I had to, almost literally, pick them out of the trash - more accurately, out of a raw LDS infodump of "people with the last name White".
This is what I've been able to reconstruct: http://www.geni.com/family-tree/index/6000000019885990188#600000001...
DO NOT merge any of these people with any of the Surrey/Hampshire Whites or any of the trees that have been fracked by having them spliced in!
The blunt fact appears to be that they were a line of plain old yeomanry with, at most, the occasional person knighted for outstanding achievements. They minded their sheep and their own business, and stayed out of trouble. And in two or three hundred years, the only real candidate for knighthood was, maybe, John White of Martock, who got shanghaied off to the Gascon wars circa 1371-72 and had a king's writ protecting his lands and possessions during his absence. (C 61/84 Gascon Roll for the 45th year of the reign of Edward III.)
Robert? White of Somerset IS NOT Robert White, of Hampshire
Thomas White of Somerset IS NOT Unknown Profile (who has in fact been disastrously Bad-Merged - I had to start him anew at Sir Thomas White, Sr., MP)
Unknown Profile IS NOT Agnes White
Past this point, the fracking is *extreme*. No one with a Martock, Merriott, Hill Farrance or South Petherton, Somerset birthplace belongs in the Hampshire/Surrey line.The reverse is also true.
Please help me get them sorted out.
Maven - which direction are you going in - up the tree or down the tree?
I show the "common ancestor" of my (current 10th cousin x something) and me to be
Maurice FitzGerald, 2nd Lord of Offaly
I can "walk that path" to document.
Or I can chase the "down the tree" target.
Up, down, all around....
The separation - and the problems - both start here: Thomas Le White of Somerset
He's the first definite "White of Somerset" - but he's had Yorkshire sons grafted on to him who probably don't belong.
His (probable) grandson, Thomas White of Martock, was assessed for taxes at Martock in 1333.
Thomas' (probable) son, John White of Martock, went off to fight in Aquitaine in 1371 and had a king's writ to protect his lands and possessions during his absence.
Two, maybe three, generations are obscure or have been obscured.
Then we finally start to get a clear series (and more trouble):
Thomas White of Somerset and his wife Agnes Richards White, of Somerset (just common Somerset folk; they do NOT belong to the high-flying Swanborne/Farnham/London crowd).
George White of Somerset, John White of Somerset, Richard White of Somerset, Alice Coles, of Somerset, and Thomas White, Jr. of Somerset belong here, not in Hampshire or Surrey or London.
Richard White of Somerset's wife, Helen White, was a Somerset commoner just as he was.
So also their eight children, of whom only Robert White "the elder" matters much, and that because his grandson John White of Lancaster emigrated to Massachusetts and hatched a brood of little Americans.
I'm ever so thankful that John White of Martock John White of Martock *did* get into the Gascon Rolls - he was the tipoff that there really was a very, very distantly connected line of Whites who were just plain Somerset farmers.
Emma Siggins White tried *so* very hard to destroy all traces of this line of "commoners" so that she could "prove" that her husband was closely connected to nobility and royalty. But she missed this guy - and he undoes all her work.
Just to be clear.
Emma Siggins White was a genealogist working born in 1857. She is not a current Geni user. Unfortunately her book on the White family is a source in the Family History library and there are LDS based records / trees built from that book.
See https://familysearch.org/eng/library/fhlcatalog/supermainframeset.a...
Erica Howton i did not know that thanks.. Private User and erica you can ignore the message i sent you about it.. I assumed falsely it was another member causing the greif..
Bad birthplace information locked in on Margaret White - she was born in Surrey, NOT Somerset.
There are some really fishy profiles connected:
Thomas White of Pernix - unless he was a cleric, he would totally screw the succession.
William Wright, of Kelvedon - born in Essex, not Hampshire, and has a clerical cut to his jib (no wife, no children, lived to 90).
Edmund White - born in Norfolk?!?!