Stephen Family, Ballaugh, Isle of Man

Five Century Timeline

14 Generations over 5 Centuries

This is the longest line in my family tree tracing fourteen generations from a birth in 1515 in the Isle of Man, to my son born in 1989. Its not a pure male line as there is one woman in the line. Dates are year of birth ...


1515 Donald MacStephan born Ballaugh, Isle of Man
1556 Robert MacStephan born Ballaugh, Isle of Man
1601 Donald MacStephan born Ballaugh, Isle of Man
1645 John Stephan born Ballaugh, Isle of Man
1667 Ffinlow Stephan born Ballaugh, Isle of Man
1689 Thomas Stephen born Ballaugh, Isle of Man
1716 Thomas Stephen born Ballaugh, Isle of Man
1751 Thomas Stephen born Ballaugh, Isle of Man
1797 Christopher Stephen born Ballaugh, Isle of Man
1843 Ellen Margaret Stephen born Ballaugh, Isle of Man
1878 John Robert Spencer born Runcorn, Cheshire
1912 Robert Hall Spencer born Manchester, Lancashire
1952 David Kenneth Spencer born Manchester, Lancashire
1989 James Richard Hall Spencer born Manchester, Gtr Manchester


What is interesting and perhaps surprising about the above line is the age of the parent when the child was born - 36 - which strikes me as quite elderley for a consistent period of five hundred years. If you take out three consecutive births at the end of the 17th / beginning of the 18th century (ie. Fffinlow and the first two Thomas's) then that average rises to over 40. Whilst both my father and son are first born, I and the majority of this line are not; which goes some way to explaining. Someone has to be the seventh son of a seventh son of a seventh son. What intriugues me is that, in the same time period, a more productive first born could have created over twenty generations.

The Beginning (in the middle)

In 1872 (I think), John Hall who was born in Brassington in Derbyshire in 1840, married Ellen Margaret Stephen who was born in Ballaugh in the Isle of Man in 1843. They were married in Wigan! What brought them together and what had brought them to Wigan?
These two people are my great grandparents, and they are buried in Weaste Cemetry in Salford - one day I need to go and find their gravestone.
John was a SADDLER by trade or in some Census Returns, he is listed as HARNESS MAKER - probably one and the same thing.
Ellen was a HATTER. Her parents had worked as Hatters in the Isle of Man; a cottage industry that was failing and so they moved to England. Initially they went to Cockermouth in Cumbria in the late 1840s and appeared there in the 1851 census. By 1861 they were living and working in Stockport at a famous Hat Making Institution called CHRISTIES.