These notes were made from 1813 to about 1817 by Mary Beeby of Allonby, an unmarried woman in a large family of local Quakers. She recorded genealogical events and other major news relating to the family. The notes were continued after her death by other female relatives.
They were passed down through various descendants of the original Beebys and came into the possession of one Bruce Walker who recognised their genealogical value and sent a transcript to the Cumbria Family History Society, who published them in their newsletter (issues 88-90, August 1998-February 1999). Thanks to him for that!
Since I'm descended from a sister of Mary Beeby, they have been of enormous use in my genealogical research. I'm aware of several other researchers who have also found them useful and I think they would be of great interest to anyone descended from the family. They are also a fascinating source of information about 19th-century Allonby. Since the newsletters were a limited print run and as far as I am aware are no longer for sale from the CFHS, I wanted to make them available to today's researchers by putting them on this site. Mr Walker and the CFHS were kind enough to give their permission. The one limitation, which I was happy to observe, was to omit material added to the memorandums in the 20th century.
Part 1 (1758-1805, Mary Beeby)
Part 2 (1806-1817, Mary Beeby)
Part 3 (1817-1882, Mary Hall, Sarah Beeby, Mary Bettoney)
The text on these pages was reconstructed by scanning, optical character recognition, and my correcting the OCR's mis-readings. My aim was to match the printed newsletters. There are a number of non-standard spellings, punctuations, etc. in the newsletters and, while I think most of them are authentic 19th-century manuscript, some may be transcription errors and there's no telling which. So I have not attempted to ‘correct’ any or mark them. Where there is an editorial comment such as “[sic]”, it is from the Newsletter version.
The printed original (and therefore I presume the manuscript) often has a comma or no punctuation where there should be a new sentence, and has some long paragraphs. To improve readability, I have inserted some new paragraph breaks but I have not inserted any where there is no sentence break. Paragraph breaks in the printed original are numbered for reference. For authenticity's sake, I have not inserted any sentence breaks - which in some cases means things run on a bit.
I haven't yet figured out how to make superscript in html, so for a couple of words abbreviated in the printed newsletter with the start of the word in normal type and the end in superscript, I have here just put an apostrophe between the two parts to indicate that a middle bit of the word is omitted.
deletethis.ianwilliamson161@gmail.com though obviously you edit the email address before you send - make it just my name and number @ service provider. Please do not delete the automatically-generated subject line, so that I know your email is not spam. You can add more to the subject if you like but if you delete what appears I may not read your mail.