Is there any evidence that Anna Christina is a child of the parents shown? The factors in contradiction include the fact that this family already has another daughter with the calling name Christina/Christiana. (They can't be the same person unless she was managing to live a double life by simultaneously being a wife and mother to the Jones family and the Dobson family).
Another indication that this Anna Christina might not be a daughter of Mathias (Somers) Sommer and Maria Christina (Null) Ricker, is the fact that she doesn't appear with that family group on the Hughes list of Lovey passengers. A photo of the Hughes list is reproduced in Les Bowser's book "The Search for Heinrich Stief, A Genealogist on the Loose" (Nimbus Publishing Limited, 2001). The original was found in the Nova Scotia Land Grant Records, Book 7, page 183. This has been microfilmed, and should be microfilm #13038 according to the Nova Scotia Archive's list converting book/page numbers to microfilm numbers. Stu Ward has kindly created a category to gather together the profiles of the Lovey passengers, based in part on the Hughes list.
While trying to think of a reason why Anna Christina is not on the list at all, and definitely not in the Somers family on that list, i brainstormed the following:
Maybe the compiler of the list was as confused as i am by two girls in the family of about the same age with the same calling name, so maybe he neglected to record one of them and also neglected to charge for her passage.
Or...
Maybe Anna Christina who married Dobson wasn't on the Lovey. Maybe she came later. Maybe she is a cousin, orphaned in Philadelphia and sent to join kin.
Or... maybe she is older than currently thought, and is a daughter of one of Matthias's earlier two marriages, joining the family to help out when Matthias dies only a year or two into the Nova Scotia adventure.
Or... any suggestions? Any way to prove or disprove?
I should add that i am a DNA match with dozens of the Dobson descendants. At first i didn't find that meaningful because all those families intermarried and I'm related to most of my matches from that community 3 to 6 times over. But today i came across a match on Ancestry who is descended from George Dobson (1817-1895) via a line that went West before marrying into any other of my ancestral lines, at least so it appears at the moment.
This caused me to want to reach out for some help on this mystery. Just who is this Anna Christina Somers who married into the Yorkshire-origins Dobson family?
