Hello, Ailsa. I will send you an e-mail as you suggest, so that we can move nearer to the present, but in the past I have been urged to continue on the board for a while, where there are points to discuss of more general interest. The question of the child-bearing age of mothers, which we have here, is one such point.

There are quite a few instances of women giving birth at 44. Indeed, in those days of married women continuing to have children until the babies stopped coming, the last one often came in the forties. The fact that Ann Clague had no children after 1764 suggests to me that she would not have been born much later than about 1721.

If we look over the whole Isle of Man for another Ann Joughin born in the 1720s, there is only the 1831 Andreas daughter of Charles Joughin and Mary Cleater, and she is well accounted for in Andreas, the ancestor of Sue of this board, among many others. I am discounting the dubious addition on what was sold to me as the last edition of the IGI to appear on microfiche: Anne dau of Robert Joughin and Alice Corteen, born about 1726 “of Maughold”.

The more I go on, the more confident I am that Mrs. Clague was the Ann Joughin from the Knockbane family.

In your last paragraph you say that Mary Clague married John Cain in Michael on the 16 Jan 1796, [when] she would have been 31[,] and [had her] last child when she was 45. The bits in square brackets are my additions. I hope they correctly express what you were saying. If so, that reinforces the possibility of having a child at 44.

Jim’s contribution is worrying. I have looked through the Bride burials of Joughins, and there is no Ann(e) Joughin buried in the period 1740-67. Even if Mrs. Ann Clague had died giving birth to Mary in 1764, or at any rate between then and her father dying in 1766 Nov, a testator of that time would usually mention all of his/her children, and the surviving offspring of any deceased child. Those that are good on 18th century Manx wills might care to comment.