William Ward's birth a mystery

I have finally completed by work looking for the birth and parents of William Ward. This has taken me more than a month doing up to an hour each day. 

As reported in earlier posts, I found 18 William Wards born in London between 1797 and 1800 (inclusive dates). I looked into other children born to the same couples, possible burials in the same parish as the baptism and later Census records.

• I ruled out 7 Williams because they could be traced in later life. One or two were clearly from wealthy families and were excluded on this basis.
• 8 more were unlikely in my opinion.
• 3 remained possible but there were no facts that favoured one over another.

My conclusions are as follows:

• It is highly unlikely that either of the current theories about William Ward’s parentage are correct (ie, William Ward and Ann Catherine Hennell or James Ward and Mary Preston).
• It is also unlikely that the parentage of William Ward could be verified from the historical records currently available.
• It remains possible, if not likely that William Ward was born outside the identified time period or was born in a rural area rather than London.

There remain some avenues that could be investigated, particularly any apprentice records that may not available electronically. In rural areas, these records may be in Parish registers and we need to remember that many of these records have been lost.

There is also the possibility that DNA linking could reveal some relevant information although I have been told that getting back to William's generation is at the extremes of where DNA linking is likely to be useful.

If anyone is interested in following what I did, I have kept rough research notes and have loaded the PDF onto the resources section of my Ward family history website at wardkemp.com. Be warned, it is a rambling document, containing a lot of thoughts and speculations (1799-ward-william-birth.pdf).

One of the things that this work illustrates is the role that online family tree services like Ancestry and Familysearch (Morman Church) play in spreading the results of poor research. Both continue to offer James Ward and Mary Preston as the 'suggested' parents of William Ward, even though it is quite easy to disprove this theory. The lesson for me is to check everything myself, verifying the source of the information and always look for other supporting information. 

I am now moving on from William to his wife Catherine Mitchell. Catherine is a more rewarding subject I think and my next post will have some new information for some of us at least!