Person talk:Elizabeth Unknown (3713)

Elizabeth wife of Henry Loker was not Elizabeth French [16 June 2011]

Unless someone can offer me any evidence that Elizabeth was Elizabeth Loker I am inclined to change her name to Unknown with French as an alt name.

Likewise I have found no evidence to support her birth date. So I am inclined to make this an alt birth.

I submit that the proper way to proceed in these cases is not to put speculation into the primary data.

Any comments?--Jhamstra 15:00, 14 June 2011 (EDT)

My opinion is that everything should be supported by evidence. So I would not make the birth date into an alternate birth unless you have a likely alternate date with evidence. And if that evidence is any good, it probably would actually suggest the date already there is unlikely and should be removed. If the existing and alternate dates are equally circumstantial/speculative, then I feel the best approach is to add a note giving the evidence for both cases (referring to other events or facts and primary documents, citing specific sources that can be verified) and educate the reader about all sides of the issue. A note, because it may be removed very easily when firm evidence for one case, or the other, or some yet-unvoiced case, is found.

The GPS has a tenet that requires an exhaustive search. The first time I read about it, I laughed, because you can never know when you have exhausted all possible sources. For that reason, I hate to remove facts, even unsupported ones, without evidence. It is too likely that I missed the key source supporting it. It is frustrating that people can't be courteous enough to cite their sources so other researchers can understand and respond to questionable or marginal assertions without guessing what their basis is. But if I can't justify changes with evidence, then I surely haven't done anything close to an exhaustive search myself. --Jrich 11:30, 15 June 2011 (EDT)

In that case I think the proper course would be to change her primary identification to Elizabeth Unknown (birth unknown) and add references supporting and refuting the claim that she was Elizabeth French.--Jhamstra 12:15, 15 June 2011 (EDT)

Well, not trying to be argumentative, merely objective, I'm still waiting for the "argued convincingly" part. Some of these websites seem to be sourced, which is good, but they are websites, not evidence, and none of the sources cited provide anything I would call convincing. The closest argument to convincing is "Researcher John Threlfall says that there were 2 distinct Riddlesdales families and that the French family is not descended from the Loker branch. There is no evidence that Elizabeth, wife of Henry Loker, was nee French [15]." But source #15 is an article of his in NEHGR and it says nothing about who Elizabeth did or did not marry ... if the daughter of Jacob is even the Elizabeth French referred to (hard to tell since no mention is made of the basis for Elizabeth French being named as Henry's wife in the first place). So John Threfall's conclusion must be based on a private communication with FFA which has not be shared with us, leaving us still in the dark. That the French family is descended from one Riddlesdale family does not in any way I can see preclude Elizabeth marrying into another branch of the Riddlesdale family that lived in the same area. There is no probate for Jacob French identifying what happened to his daughter Elizabeth, and Elizabeth is not shown marrying anybody at all, so nothing shown seems to argue for or against either position. The other website is a bunch of assertions with no proof, the only source cited being the Douglas Richardson article already cited first hand, which doesn't even mention Elizabeth French, merely saying there is no evidence of what her surname is, and offering the guess cited, which is explicitly identified as nothing more than that, a guess. But he never proves that she is not Elizabeth French, and since her surname is only unknown, it remains a possibility. All these website citations are doing is cluttering up the page. We need evidence. --Jrich 13:47, 16 June 2011 (EDT)

It is well-known in logic that the only way to prove that a fact does not exist is to prove that it cannot exist. For this reason the burden of proof generally lies with the party asserting that a fact exists. Postulating that something exists and then demanding that others disprove it is a logical fallacy.

In this case I could claim that she was Elizabeth (any other surname prevalent in her region) and insist that you prove she was not - in the absence of contravening evidence all assertions about her name at birth are equally valid and therefore equally invalid.

All that can be claimed here with any support that I have found is that Elizabeth wife of Henry Loker and Elizabeth French were apparently contemporaries in that part of England - given the prevalence of the name Elizabeth that hardly argues they were the same person.

From [S3] she would most likely have been Elizabeth Perry or Elizabeth Simpson. If you want to mix-and-match spouses then from [S5] she could have been Elizabeth French or Elizabeth Warren with equal probability.

[S4] and [S6] do reference other portions of [S3] so I believe they add information. If you actually consulted [S4] you would find it carefully constructed, and in my opinion more credible than [S5], [S6] or [S7]

[S7] is the only source I have been able to find that systematically ties the Elizabeth (French) Loker theory to any larger context - unfortunately without any evidence to support that conclusion.

In each case I have tried to include only enough context so that their conclusions can be compared.

The minimalist approach would only include "facts" supported by [S1], [S2] and [S3] which would leave her as Elizabeth Unknown which was my original proposal.--Jhamstra 14:21, 16 June 2011 (EDT)

The statement on the person page said that there were sources arguing convincingly (or even credibly as it now says) that his wife was not Elizabeth French. That appears to me to be a misrepresentation of the situation.

I am not arguing against changing the surname to Unknown. Admittedly, it is my style that I don't feel comfortable erasing something when I don't know the basis for, and can't disprove. Partly, it is a nagging feeling that it means I am at fault for not having done an exhaustive search. But, based on many sources saying her surname is simply not known, changing the surname to Unknown is not unreasonable. But that in no way implies that she is not Elizabeth French. I haven't seen anything that prevents Elizabeth French from potentially being the right answer.

Henry Loker is commonly paired with Elizabeth French, presumably based on something. Whether it was speculation or had an evidence-based origin is unknown to me. Unfortunately people copy the facts without copying the evidence, so we don't have the original basis for this assertion. This is unfortunate, as one way of refuting this is to know why it is asserted, and then show that the basis for this assertion is impossible, or a misinterpretation, etc.

To prove that Elizabeth French is wrong, one could obviously find a different positive identification of Henry Loker's wife, such as a will naming her as the testator's daughter, etc. Alternately, one could show that Elizabeth French couldn't have been Henry's wife because she died unmarried or married someone else or was still in England when Henry Loker's wife was known to be in New England, etc. I am not aware that any of these have been done.

There is no evidence on any of these websites showing any connection of Henry Loker's wife to any set of parents, a birth date or even a birth location, be it French or not French. I don't even find the guess in the Richardson article all that convincing because people often immigrated with other persecuted church members who shared common beliefs, and of course, once in New England, they would likely to be especially close to such a fellow adventurer from back home, all of which would have similar symptoms as immigrating with family members. Further, the wife often moved to where the husband lived after marriage, so without a marriage record, it is impossible to say that Elizabeth was even a native of Bures St. Mary, the other assumption that went into the Richardson guess.

You mentioned something about well-constructed websites. How well a website is constructed does not give it authority. What gives any website (any secondary source, actually) authority is the nature of the evidence it presents. Trusting a stranger's assertions, even their interpretation of good sources, when there is so much obvious garbage genealogy on the Internet is foolish. So in general, citing websites is not very useful. It is better to get rid of the middleman, citing the sources directly if they are credible. Further, in this case, there is the added disadvantage that the websites mentioned here don't use footnotes, and so ambiguity is introduced about which facts come from the cited sources and which have been added from who-knows-where. Specifically, in the case of the French Family Association website, the presentation makes it appear that the cited NEHGR article supports the argument about Elizabeth French, when it is actually silent about the whole thing, and only talks about her baptism. --Jrich 18:47, 16 June 2011 (EDT)

Jrich,

I wrote "If you actually consulted [S4] you would find it carefully constructed, and in my opinion more credible than [S5], [S6] or [S7]".

You wrote "Further, in this case, there is the added disadvantage that the websites mentioned here don't use footnotes".

Your comment is totally valid with respect to [S7], somewhat valid with respect to [S6] and [S5] and totally invalid with respect to [S4]. From this I conclude that you did not bother to investigate any of these sources before responding to my last post on this Talk page.

I wrote "constructed" in the formal logic sense but you interpreted it in some other sense. In formal logic a well-constructed argument is a very good thing.

It is more than coincidence that I have listed these last four references according to my assessment of their credibility.

May I respectfully suggest that you either (a) be willing to take the time to research the sources I have cited in substance as opposed to a cursory examination of form, before rebutting my arguments; or (b) be willing to defer to the judgment of someone who just might have looked into this particular question more carefully and critically than you appear to have done to this point?

On the one hand you are objecting to the verbosity of my references, which I thought to be the minimum necessary to represent their various positions on the subject of disagreement, yet on the other hand you do not appear to have bothered to delve into them and assimilate their supporting arguments (be they few or many).

Specifically [S5] and [S6] being excerpts from the same source both appear to have been inferred from the same author you added in [S3] albeit from different pages as you would see had you studied them carefully. In this case the statement "Elizabeth m. William Siday; however, another source says Elizabeth Warren m. William Siday. Note: This is not the Elizabeth who m. Henry Loker, bp. 1576/7 in Bures St. Mary. Researcher John Threlfall says that there were 2 distinct Riddlesdales families and that the French family is not descended from the Loker branch." [S5] would certainly support the conclusion "Henry Riddlesdale, alias Loker, married Elizabeth (not French). There is no evidence that Elizabeth, wife of Henry Loker, was born a French." [S6] found shortly below it in the narrative. Elsewhere this source reconstructs the know intermarriages between the French family and the "other" Riddlesdale family which is consistent with this assertion.

On the other hand you appear to have rightly concluded that [S7] offers no support for any of its assertions that I have observed. I mostly ignore this site and only included it here as it presents the most cogent case that Elizabeth French married Henry Loker (weak as it may appear to me).

A careful inquirer could click on these links, read the remainder of the information contained therein, and decide how credible are the claims. Surely this is the purpose of References?

From all of the foregoing I claim that the preponderance of the available evidence supports the summary as I have edited it. I urge any who disagree to propose a more accurate summary, or to supply more credible references.

Please do not confuse form with substance. Arguments from substance are ultimately stronger than arguments from form. It has aptly been said that "consistency is the refuge of small minds". Scientific knowledge advances as much or more by refuting theories as by confirming them.

I learned early in my long career in systems engineering that you can kill any endeavor by constantly demanding additional justification. At some point forward progress requires that we act on the best available data.

For me that time seems at hand as regards Elizabeth the wife of Henry Loker (who happens to be one of my ancestors which is why I am trying to clean up this remote corner of my WeRelate family tree).

PS - regarding the origins of some of these unsubstantiated online "family legends" I have theories which I might discuss privately but certainly not for attribution in a public forum.--Jhamstra 21:21, 16 June 2011 (EDT)

I looked at S4 and unless the proof is under some other person than Elizabeth or Henry, the only thing they did was cite S3, which obviously I have read, since I added S3 myself. So maybe I don't know what you mean by well-constructed, but if you mean a well constructed logical proof, it ain't. S4 doesn't mention the possibility that she is Elizabeth French, so obviously does not refute it. Douglas Richardson in S3, which S4 cites, says he does not know who Henry Loker's wife is, but he also never presents the possibility that she is Elizabeth French, so never directly refutes that or presents any evidence to rule it out other than something he labels a guess, which is by definition, not proof. Practically every date in S4 is circa something or other, showing how little of its information is based on actual records, and what's worse, there is no an explanation of how those estimates were arrived at. It didn't even cite the source for her death date which is probably the one thing everybody agrees on, because it was recorded in the Vital Records of Sudbury, and therefore is a primary source available to anyone with an Internet connection. Nor do they provide any information about Henry's will which is another primary source that is readily available. I was not impressed by S4 as a credible source.

But yes, S4 indicates it reliance on S3 by a "footnote", once after the birthdate "1585/86", when no birthdate is ever given or even estimated in the original article, and once again after the emigration date of "1638/39" when the article says "in 1639". It seems plainly obvious that saying that it is accurately footnoted is false. In any event, there is no footnote on the statements about her marriage.

The only source I would give the time of day to in the last four to was Threlfall (who was not cited directly but was mentioned by the FFA website) because he has published an article in NEHGR, establishing his credentials, and since he studied the French family as documented in English records, he was in a position perhaps to show she didn't marry Henry Loker. But if you look at his article in vol. 142 (which I did, did you?), he says nothing about this. He doesn't mention her marriage to Henry Loker as a possibility, nor does he present a single piece of evidence to show who she married or who she didn't marry, only about when she was baptized and who her parents were.

Out of the blue, the FFA website talks about Elizabeth French marrying William Siday but doesn't give any source of any kind or any evidence to justify this (what parish did it happen in?) and immediately confirms that this is far from proven by mentioning that other people think it was a different Elizabeth, Elizabeth Warren. William Siday is not mentioned by the Threlfall article so this does not come from English parish registers. It is just speculation, and unfortunately presented poorly, so that its speculative nature can be missed by a quick reading.

These websites are not proof. Proof is a deed, a will, a parish record, a passenger list, some primary document written by somebody with first hand knowledge, not some website trying to guess who it was nearly 400 years after the fact.

I agree it is not shown that Henry Loker's wife is Elizabeth French, make no mistake about that. But it is important to indicate exactly what is known and what is not known, and Elizabeth French has not been ruled out, even by the most lax standards of proof. At least not by sources that have been cited on this page, nor even by the larger set of sources that I have personally looked at... --Jrich 00:32, 17 June 2011 (EDT)

Immigration [17 June 2011]

p. 3: Henry 1639, John 1639. Richard Newton (m. Ann in England) 1639. The only 1638 I see is Robert Davis but he did not marry Bridget until after immigration, so this doesn't imply anything about Elizabeth or Bridgit immigrating. Placing the Lokers on the Confidence based on Robert Davis being on it would be an unwarranted assumption. I don't see where it says "some of her children came in 1638"?

p. 16: "When Elizabeth Loker and her children came to New England does not appear. They were in Sudbury as early as the fall of 1638." In other words, they do not show up on any passenger list and we can only find their first recorded appearance in Sudbury to estimate when they emigrated. The phrases "as early as the fall of 1638" is the type of vague assertion that usually indicates assumption (because if it was based on fact, it would have a precise date or mention a specific event they participated in, such as witnessing a deed or appearing in court). Probably the author is thinking that they did not walk off the boat and have land handed to them so they probably arrived some time before the grant. Nonetheless that is an assumption, not a fact. If you have a dated event showing them in Sudbury in 1638, please post the source. It is probable that Elizabeth immigrated with John Parmenter and that is listed as 1639 by this and most sources.

S6, which you detached from the emigration fact, says "Elizabeth, after Henry died, went to New England in 1639 with her four children and settled in Sudbury". S8, which you also attached, is a source documented the land grant in 1639, which is I believe, the first actual recorded notice of the Lokers in New England, and hence the best that can be proved. --Jrich 09:39, 17 June 2011 (EDT)

1) Appearing in Sudbury which is well inland the last time I was there, is not the same as arriving in Massachusetts via ship from England.

2) In my copy of [S1] I have Robert Davis appearing in Sudbury in 1638, Henry and John Loker in 1639 and Richard Newton in 163[blurry]. If Richard appeared in 1639 then feel free to adjust my tally.

3) From elsewhere in the various sources you will find that these gentlemen became Freemen in 1645. The standard indenture was seven years. The obvious conclusion is that they were indentured in the spring or summer of 1638. Typical practice was they became indentured when they received fare for passage to the new world - typically paid directly to the captain by the investors. I doubt the investors would have indentured them a year before they sailed from England.

4) The WeRelate pages for Elizabeth's daughters show them married in England before 1638. If those dates and locations are incorrect then it might be more productive for you to address those matters rather than endlessly quibbling with me over the wording of footnotes.

5) Although it is possible that their husbands preceded them most accounts of the Puritans have the families traveling together for better or for worse (often the latter).

6) I doubt that an elderly (in her day) widow would have sailed alone or that anyone would have purchased her fare to sail alone.

Considering all of the above the most reasonable conclusion is that the entire extended family emigrated from England together sometime in the spring or summer of 1638.

The next most likely conclusion is that Robert and (probably) Bridget emigrated in the spring of 1838 (probably on the Confidence) and that the rest of them followed in the summer.

I think [S1 p16] got it right. If you think [S6] is more credible than [S1] then I must beg to differ - why would you prefer [S6], which you derided elsewhere, in this case?--Jhamstra 10:31, 17 June 2011 (EDT)

Your whole immigration argument is based on Robert Davis being married prior immigration, so it is incumbent on you to show that that is so to make your argument. If you look, I think you will find that sources do not propose a marriage until sometime in 1640's based on the birth of their daughter Sarah in 1646 [e.g., S3]. Immigration and land grants are not the same, but assuming an immigration before a recorded event is exactly that: an assumption and not the proper basis for a community genealogy. The land is cited because it is a proves immigration by 1639. You can make all sorts of hand-waving arguments for 1638, and indeed, it seems very probable they could have immigrated in 1638, but it cannot be shown to be so. Some times things can't be known, and it is important not to present assumption and speculation as facts. They are not. --Jrich 10:52, 17 June 2011 (EDT)

PS. the WeRelate pages also show Ann as the oldest child even though she is explicitly called the younger daughter in her father's will. The marriage to Richard Newton is "ca 1635" and has no source justifying that date, i.e., it deserves no consideration. Several people, hopefully myself included, are working to get the WeRelate pages based on verifiable sources, but until that is more widely completed, they unfortunately are of a very mixed quality and in some cases are hopelessly unreliable. --Jrich 11:03, 17 June 2011 (EDT)

PPS. The Newton Genealogy [S1], p. 16: In 1638 Robert Davis, aged 30, and his sister Margaret Davis, aged 26, came over on the ship Confidence, as servants of Peter Noyes. Wouldn't a wife be included, if he was married then? --Jrich 11:25, 17 June 2011 (EDT)

Jrich,

You wrote "Your whole immigration argument is based on Robert Davis being married prior immigration".

I hardly think that (4) is my whole argument?

I completely concur that there are many errors on WeRelate and I heartily endorse your desire to correct them. However considering that Robert Davis was not one of my known ancestors and the onerous effort required to fix anything non-trivial on a page that you are watching, I will defer to someone else to sort out the obvious discrepancies in the late Robert's historical narrative.

Going forward I would request that when editing material I have provided you scrutinize your own work as diligently as you have scrutinized mine.

I submit that footnotes referring to other sources should attempt to accurately represent their positions which may or my not concur with yours or mine. It was in this spirit that I contributed [S4-7] even though I do not agree with some of their conclusions. (You may or may not wish to know that in my professional life I have both authored and refereed papers published in scholarly journals.)

When you edited [S1] I submit that you misrepresented the conclusions of the author by conflating appearance in America (p2) (the author's stated intent) with appearance in Sudbury (your evident intent), by omitting Robert who appeared in America in 1638 (p3) and by omitting the author's conclusion (p16) with which you differ.--Jhamstra 11:36, 17 June 2011 (EDT)

I did not misrepresent the conclusions of the author, what I did was cite the verifiable facts and give less regard to the obvious assumptions (my explanation identifying it as an assumption was given above in a previous posting) which is what a discerning genealogist should do. Avoiding unlabelled assumptions is exactly why primary sources are so desirable. But you are always free to find a verifiable primary document, or even a reference to a primary document, showing them in New England in 1638 and I would heartily accept it. One of the reasons for putting About 1639 as an immigration date was to reflect the exact date is unknown, since p. 16 says "When Elizabeth Loker and her children came to New England does not yet appear". Being the topic sentence of a paragraph, I take this as the actual conclusion, not the later assumption.

You mentioned children being here in 1638. This requires that Bridget married Robert Davis before immigration since the other three are listed as 1639 in the Newton Genealogy. Without this marriage before immigration, there is no evidence than any of them were in New England by 1638, other than assumptions.

Sources S4 through S7 are not good sources. I left them there of deference to you, but a serious genealogist would not place much faith in any one of them. S4 has several examples of misrepresenting it cited source, and doesn't mention many sources even a most cursory investigation should have found. The French Family Association (S5 and S6) makes several misstatements that indicate an agenda, calling into question its credibility, which is worrisome because it calls into question much of what it does present based on assumptions and speculation. (For example, a source-based presentation would have named what sources show Elizabeth French marrying William Siday, and the sources that say Elizabeth Warren married William Siday, so they could be assessed and verified. For all I know, they found one website that said so. If websites that saying so was meaningful, we'd have to accept Elizabeth French as Henry Loker's wife.) S7, as you noted, is not worth considering. Maybe you don't like my assessment of your sources, but it is consistent with the tenets of GPS, and is only based on a desire to be accurate so that I don't propagate half-truths and bad assumptions, which are so common on the Internet. --Jrich 14:32, 17 June 2011 (EDT)

When I joined WeRelate I do not recall any requirement that my use of the site be governed by "GPS"

I have two "GPS" that both work fine and so far they do not seem to object to anything I have done on this site - only the amount of time spent debating epistemology.

You are free to operate according to the dictates of your "GPS" but that does not give you the right to impose or enforce them on everyone else who contributes to this wiki.--Jhamstra 16:01, 17 June 2011 (EDT)

In most serious discourse References are used to present their author's contributions, whereas Notes my also be use to support one's own contributions.

Selectively interspersing your own commentary with excerpts from a Reference may be a useful rhetorical device but it is not as credible as first accurately presenting the source's viewpoint and separately your own evaluation.

I have no idea whether your "GPS" condones this practice but I certainly object to it.--Jhamstra 16:06, 17 June 2011 (EDT)

I am not aware of ever writing anything about the children of Bridget and Robert Davis - in fact I have never ever asked or even wondered whether they had any children - nor any inclination to debate that question.

I believe I wrote that Elizabeth widow of Henry Loker emigrated to America with her children - that is certainly what I intended to write.

Incidentally, I believe that Bridget may well have married Robert onboard ship or after they arrived in Massachusetts. I have absolutely no stake in any debate over when and where they married and refuse to be drawn into this matter. I merely referred to their marriage information as it appeared on WeRelate at the time of my writing.

However given the cost and risk associated with emigration in those difficult and perilous times I think it highly unlikely that Elizabeth traveled alone and most likely that she and her children emigrated together - that is the way the Puritans generally handled things.

If they came on a later ship after Robert which I suggested as a probable conclusion then Bridget could have married Robert either before they all left or (more likely in this scenario) after they all arrived.--Jhamstra 16:24, 17 June 2011 (EDT)

You may wish to google "Genealogical Proof Standard". The material may be helpful. Or not. You can learn the same principles on your own the hard way after you have been betrayed by enough Internet websites. Cheers. --Jrich 17:54, 17 June 2011 (EDT)

If you look at my own contributions to WeRelate apart from the needlessly protracted exercise to justify changing this record to "Unknown", I have made very few references to other web sites.

Be not misled - I do not place blind faith in web sites any more than I would place blind faith in books in libraries, legal documents, academic professors or whatever. I carefully scrutinize and fearlessly examine the merits of any source I encounter - especially if I am being asked to sign it.

It has been many years since I claimed I could "prove" anything to anybody - I will spare you most of the details but suffice it to say that in my youth I was an honors Mathematics and Physics student who thought I knew how to "prove" things and discovered to my dismay what a foolish aspiration that is. That discovery was tremendously liberating because only then was I able to begin to learn things I would not otherwise know from sources that were far more ignorant and error-prone than I was. I once wrote a theoretical paper that concluded the hallmark of intelligence was the ability to distinguish (or filter) what is most relevant for the question at-hand from a potentially large space of inputs of widely varying quality and accuracy.

Perhaps you should create a separate and more exclusive wiki called WeProve for those who wish to bound their enquiries by GPS.

On the other hand this wiki is called WeRelate rather then WeProve for a reason. And I joined it despite the obvious nonsense I found had been uploaded here - for the purpose of collaboration with others who seemed to have access to potentially useful information and a willingness to share it.

In one of many searches for information about Samuel Bauer Wilson and Susan (Newton) Wilson I found the statement on a web site that their marriage at a certain place and date had been "sealed for eternity" with absolutely no supporting evidence. By your application of GPS rules I should have ignored this source. Without speculating on their future destiny I did note that they had Susan's birthday correct and were close to my records regarding the marriage date. Perhaps coincidence but also possible that they may have found a potentially useful source so I went looking for it. What I eventually found (thanks to the enormous coverage of Google) was the Newton genealogy book that you have been taking shots at. A single line in that book mentions Susan Newton's vitals including whom she married but that was sufficient for me to connect the dots.

Not "proof" by your lights but the lady who wrote that book did an incredible job to track down (probably in some old family Bible) and record for posterity a piece of information I had despaired of finding. Does this make all of her work infallible? No but if she was that careful and accurate on something that was of no consequence to her about someone whose family did not know where they ended up she was probably as careful about most of the rest of her work. By the norms of her time this was a remarkable piece of work. You may learn nothing from this book but it has both answered longstanding family questions and dispelled longstanding family legends for me.

Incidentally the "sealed" marriage may have been close to the right date but the locations attributed to the marriage and to Samuel Wilson's origin (and his birth date) were almost certainly wrong (albeit reasonable guesses). All the Newton book gives is his first and last names which were probably all the author ever saw. Nevertheless she got the story right.

My grandmother who passed along the family records was certainly unaware of this book. But this book confirms that she also got this part of her story right. But of course GPS would not regard my aunt's transcription of my Grandmother's notes as "proof". By GPS rules I probably know virtually nothing about my family history. I do not even know whether my parents exist or what are their names because they do not appear on any public document that I have ever seen.--Jhamstra 18:55, 17 June 2011 (EDT)

Immigration, Residence and Property are not always the same [17 June 2011]

Residence may imply Immigration - however there are many examples of temporary residents being enumerated (or multiply enumerated) in Census data.

Property (esp small farms) typically implies Residence however there are many instances of people owning small farms in different states or even countries.

Residence does not imply Property - many people were tenants - some eventually bought land.--Jhamstra 10:00, 17 June 2011 (EDT)