Greetings,
In 1698, one Jonathan Shakespear of Shadwell, Tower Hamlets took out a marriage license for a marriage to Elizabeth Shallett. It's Elizabeth I'm trying to track.
What I know... I hope.
The license says that the marriage was with the consent of her mother and her uncle Arthur. She was 19, thus a birth about 1679. The marriage was to be at Clapham. Unfortunately the Clapham records for 1688 to 1702 are missing, both from the London Metropolitan Archives and Ancestry. The BTs have even bigger gaps. One or two trees indicate that the marriage took place at Shadwell, however the Shadwell registers for this time exist. No marriage. A tree in The Pedigree Register vol 2, page 304, on archive.org, gives her parentage as Francis Shallett and an unknown wife. There is a bit of a problem here as Francis's baptism in Nov 1635 has her/him as the daughter of Edmond Shallett and Frances nee Lomer.
Arthur's will has five children, Bennett, Joseph, Arthur, Edmund and Sarah. I've not been able to locate baptisms for any of them, either in Hampshire or in London. They would have been baptized around the same time as Elizabeth. Arthur's entry in the Parliamentaryhistory indicates that he was a wealthy nonconformist MP.
So, does anyone have any idea where nonconformists could have had their children baptized in or around Exton, Hants or London in the late 1600s (1674-1690)?
I'm tending towards the view that Elizabeth was illegitimate, parentage unknown. There are clues, but no proof that I can find.
Keith
