Person talk:Amy Unknown (30)

questions about Amy herself [5 January 2012]

Did Amy really not marry until age 35?

Did Amy really have a child at age 54?

In other words, how do you know what Amy's birthdate is? Your questions about Amy's parents all depend on her birthdate being correct. What if Amy's birthdate was, say about 1560. Then she married at 22, had the last child at 41, much more normal. Assuming those dates are right. --Jrich 21:02, 4 January 2012 (EST)

Precisely my point! There are a lot of implausible sequences of parent-child birth-death dates in this database.

I understand the utility of estimation but --

1) they should be clearly labeled as estimates.

2) they should be biologically and sociologically plausible estimates.

I see too much splicing of families with too little regard for accuracy or even plausibility. So I call-out the more egregious examples.

--Jhamstra 21:09, 4 January 2012 (EST)

Well, these pages are, from an academic standpoint, garbage. That is, unfortunately, the state of 95% of Internet genealogy so unless somebody had put in good data on the page with convincing sources, it cannot be surprising that the vacuum gets filled by this type of stuff. But my point was that it was arbitrary to detach the parents using the justification of misaligned dates when Amy has such an improbable date on her page, and when correcting Amy's birth estimate makes the unnamed parent's dates look almost believable. Now it's garbage strewn about, instead of garbage bundled together. The correct way to handle this is to provide sources and better data. My feeling is, if one is not interested enough to do some research to improve it, one is in no position to complain about lack of research. --Jrich 10:58, 5 January 2012 (EST)

I did not detach the parents because of the incongruous birth date estimates.

I detached the parents because they were both named Unknown Metcalf. Amy's married name was Metcalf. It is highly unlikely that she, her father, and her mother were all born with that same surname - unless there was a lot of inbreeding among the Metcalf's?

Probably I should have deleted the parents' records? --Jhamstra 12:11, 5 January 2012 (EST)