A Brief History of the Atkins, Stewart, and Smith Families - New Page 1

The Smith Family
Introduction
This section documents the Smith family that intersects the Atkins and Stewart family by way of
the marriage of Leonard Doyle Smith and Alice Stewart.
The process of piecing together this family was somewhat more difficult than the other families
because of the commonality of the name Smith and because of a collection of source data
contradictions. Data from ancestry.com, familysearch.com, and public family trees found on
ancestry.com were used, and often there were conflicts of data. In one particular case, a
particular woman was shown to be married to two different Smith men. This kind of conflict is
often found when independent researches post their work in the same place.
I spent many hours trying to resolve these conflicts and prove the various relationships to the
extent that I now feel the family described below is correct to the best information that I have.
The Smith Family Prior to 1850
Beginning in 1850, US census data is of such a quality that families can generally be accurately
documented. Prior to 1850, the census data is marginal and so one has to rely first on familysupplied
data and then on data provided by other genealogy web sites including the Mormon
Church genealogy website and www.ancestry.com. This is where problems usually arise because
sometimes data provided by other researchers can be erroneous or in conflict. This data is only as
good as the people who collect it. In this case, I had very little family-provided data so I had to
rely almost exclusively on other data sources.
William Smith Sr.
The first Smith family members that can be connected to this family line leading to Leonard
Doyle Smith is William Smith Sr, born in about 1630 or 1635 in Yorkshire, England. He married
Jane Wilberfoss on 1 November 1660 in Shipton (or Kingston Hall upon Hull), Yorkshire,
England.
As with the other families in this genealogy report, I will represent each family using a simple
table. Table cells without information indicate that I do not have that information.
William Sr and Jane had at least 7 children. Here is the William Smith Sr family:
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