Elizabeth (Gough) Alexander (1755 - 1825)

In this case, the documentation is not absolutely certain, but there is no evidence for the death of the first Elizabeth or the birth of a second.

Some family lists show the dates of births of the parents and many death records show age at death; neither records clarifies the date of birth of the Elizabeth Gough who married William Alexander. We do know that she married in 1783 when she would have been 28 (reasonable for a Quaker marriage) or 20 (a little on the low side but within the bounds of possibility). We also know that she had her last child in 1799 when she would have been either 44 (certainly possible) or 36 (perhaps a little early given that both she and her husband lived on).

Her parents' family list clearly records her birth and the births of other children up to as late as 1760 [not all on wikitree as yet]. There is no record of the birth of a second Elizabeth. As his profile says, James Gough and his family travelled around, including a move to England in about 1760, so it is possible that the Irish records might have missed births after that date. Elizabeth Barnes would only have been 39 at the time, so she certainly might have had other children. However, the family were such good Quakers that one would certainly have expected later births to show up in the records in either England or Ireland, and the don't appear in either.

And the family list which only records one Elizabeth's birth includes a note 'Elizabeth married Wm Alexander', strongly suggesting that it was the same person.

Given this, and the absence of either a death record for the first Elizabeth or a birth record for the second, I am inclined to believe that there was only one, unless someone can produce a source to say otherwise.

Alan

I had been holding off from merging the two items on wikidata for Elizabeth because I wasn't sure, but having read what you've written, I've now gone ahead and made the combination. In particular, if a first Elizabeth had died young, then it does seem likely, as you suggest, that at least either a record of her death or a record of a second birth would exist.

I see from his ODNB entry ([1] revising [2]) that her uncle John wrote a memoir of her father, Memoirs of the Life of James Gough (1781). That perhaps might settle it, if anybody wanted to investigate further.

It doesn't detail all of his children. It does say that eight children accompanied him when he left Ireland for Bristol, which is consistent with his family list (10 born and two already died). I don't see any reference to other births after this or to a death for Elizabeth, but I don't think that this is definitive.