People Dismissed from My Family Tree (A)

No - there's nothing sinister here, no misdemeanours which have caused their removal! I've just started going through my family sheets and looking at some of the families who are not linked to a particular Tree to find out if there is any way of finding them a proper home in the Tree where they belong. There are more than 500 people included in this category - almost one-third of the records I hold. Hopefully then some at least can be repatriated if I can gather enough clues.
My first challenge relates to James and Ann HOOKIN(G)S both born at the end of the 1700s. I have now located from an on-line site the baptisms record of both James and Ann (nee LYDDON) and a record of their marriage in 1826 in Brompton Ralph which links them to a family in my Tree living there at the time. There is a James in that family - great - but I find that he seems to be married to a Sarah (nee HALE) - not great! But everything seems to fit into place for the new James so where did I get the HALE marriage from? I delve back to 1990 when I was given a huge amount of information which virtually doubled the records for my Tree and the detail was provided then by the father of my contact for all that information. I am not however able to find any record to verify it. What my contact did tell me was that "his" James was an ancestor of someone called HAWKINS! I can find no record of the HOOKINS/HALE marriage several acceptable links for James and Ann not least that the name LYDDON appears several times in my Tree as a second Christian name. So HOOKINS/HALE have been ejected from Tree A and replaced by the HOOKINS/LYDDON partnership. Their wedding witnesses were William HOOKINS (Father of groom?) and Ann LYDDON (Mother of bride). The bride's mother was living with the couple in the 1851 Census as a 90 year old widow but by the time of the 1861 Census James was a widower. So 2 people removed from my records - new number of individual records held 1538 - and one family removed - new number of families 397. Where will the next challenge take me?