Eleanor Ringe

We know from Thomas Shannon’s 1794 will in Wilkes County, Georgia, that his wife’s name was Eleanor. Her maiden name is cited in many trees as Ringie/Ringey/Ringe/Ring etc..  As far as I’ve been able to determine, this is apparently based on the work of some genealogist hired back in the 1970s by descendants of Aaron Shannon (1796-1865) in Texas to document family history.   

It became part of the DAR record for Thomas and has been accepted uncritically by most of our ancestry.  Unfortunately, there has never been any actual documentation submitted to the DAR or anywhere else to support this. 

There is no explanation of where any of this information came from.   If it was from a family oral tradition or a family bible somewhere, I am suspicious that this might simply be a name misspelling.  No Ringe family can be found near to our Shannon lineage, but there was a Rigney family in Pittsylvania county, VA at about the same time.  Simply transposing two letters changes one name into the other.  But even with that, there is no documentation for any such union.   

The fact is that we have no firm documentation on who Eleanor’s original family was.   This is why I find the New Castle, Delaware records from 1755 to be the most compelling for Eleanor’s origins, with a Thomas Shannon and Johanna Carey having a daughter named Eleanor, all names which appear later in Thomas’ will in different order and spelling.

There are other possibilities for her maiden name, however.   There was a close association with a Casey family, so perhaps she was a Casey. There is a curious marriage record from 1750 Maryland for a marriage between a Thomas Shannon and Elizabeth Kersey. Kersey apparently was frequently written as Casey, perhaps because local dialects dropped the ‘r’ in pronunciation.    Of course, the close comparison between Casey and Carey also seems curious.  But I’ve never found a link between Casey, Kersey and Carey either in documents or in genetic results.

She might also have been an Owen(s) since she had a son named Owen and one of her daughters married Thomas Owen which suggests a possible family relationship to some Owen family.