Eleanor Ringie/Ringey/Ringe/Ring etc

Some version of the name Eleanor Ringe is cited in many trees as Thomas Shannon’s wife.  This is apparently based on the work of a genealogist hired back in the 1970s to document family history.    It became part of the DAR record for Thomas and has been accepted uncritically by most researchers of this 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 came from.   If it is true, we need someone to publish the actual documentation for it.

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 Ringey family can be found near to our Shannon lineage, but there is 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 Carey name mentioned in the New Castle, Delaware records from 1755 to be the most compelling as a record of her maiden name.

There are other possibilities for her maiden name, however.   There was a close association with a Casey family, so perhaps she was a Casey.  Also a marriage record of a Thomas Shannon and Elizabeth Kersey (variant spelling of Casey) from Maryland in 1750 also exists.   Of course, the close comparison between Casey and Carey seems curious, especially since Casey is frequently written as ‘Kersey’. There must have been some odd pronunciation of that name early on. But no genetic ties have been discovered between modern people with the names Carey and Casey. So, this is an open question.

There have also been suggestions that she might 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.