The scope
This site covers the descendants of James Rigby, a schoolmaster who was living in Lower Chichester by June 1760 and died in Delaware County on 9 March 1801. It follows his line for ten generations to the present, and it takes in the families that married into it — Brown, Harlan, John, Fleming, Smith, Brittain, Bradley.
It stops where he does. Nobody knows where James Rigby was born, or to whom. Two published genealogies say England; other sources say Pennsylvania. Until that is settled he is where this begins.
Why this branch. Because the documents survive for it, and because a sixteen-page typescript memoir written by a descendant in the twentieth century gave us a set of specific claims to test. Much of the work here is that test: what the memoir says, what the records say, and where the two part company.
How evidence is handled
Four rules, applied consistently:
1. A document beats a genealogy. Where a compiled genealogy disagrees with a will, a register or a tax roll, the manuscript wins and the disagreement is stated rather than quietly resolved. Two of the books used here — Cope 1901 and Harlan 1914 — were assembled from family informants a century after the events, and they are treated accordingly.
2. Tradition is labelled as tradition. Anything resting on family memory, an unsourced tree, or a single late witness says so on the line. Middle names that appear in no contemporary record are not adopted.
3. Open questions stay open in public. Where the evidence does not decide, the page says so and names the test that would decide it. There are eight such items on the James Rigby page alone.
4. Corrections are published, not patched. When something here turns out to be wrong it is fixed and written up in the journal. Three corrections are recorded there so far: a schoolhouse that had not been built, a stone house that belongs to a different man, and a burial place that came from misreading a sentence.
Documents, not paraphrase
Every manuscript reproduced here carries a transcription, so a reader never has to decipher eighteenth-century handwriting to check a claim. Original spelling and abbreviation are kept; square brackets mark an editorial expansion, ⟦angle brackets⟧ mark what is illegible. Where a document has not yet been read word for word, the transcription block says so instead of guessing. Paraphrase inside quotation marks is the one thing this site will not do.
Living people
People living or recently deceased are not written up here, are not photographed here, and are not named — with the single exception of the compiler. The archive behind the site holds more recent generations; the site does not publish them.
Who made it
Compiled by Samuel Rigby, James Rigby’s seventh great-grandson, from an archive of page images, transcriptions and field photographs assembled since June 2026. Research, transcription and drafting have been done in collaboration with an AI assistant; every manuscript reading published here has been checked against the original scan, and the places where that check has not been done are marked.
Corrections and contact
If you descend from this family, hold papers, or can settle one of the open questions — particularly the St Martin’s registry the Rev. R. U. Morgan described in 1831, which has never been located — that would be very welcome. Errors reported will be fixed and credited.
Where James Rigby was born, and in which country. Where he is buried. Morgan’s St Martin’s registry. Which room the 1777 school met in. Who the boy under sixteen was in the 1790 census household. Whether Elizabeth Harlan was disowned in 1796–97. Which tax entries belong to the second James Rigby. Each is stated on the relevant page with the test that would settle it.