User:Jrich/Case Studies

Watchers

The purpose of this page is to document particularly interesting pages that I work on. I tend to work on a lot of pages that have no connection to my family, so I see a lot of different problems. Some are interesting from a genealogical standpoint, some have morals to learn by, some are possibly noteworthy in presenting information (possibly) found no where else, some are outstanding examples of what NOT to do. These are in no particular order and the page is broken into sections somewhat arbitrarily just to make it more manageable.

Contents

William Damon (Writing It in Stone Does Not Make It True)

Family:William Daman and Lucy Bryant (1). This page is interesting because of the family memorial shown on Find A Grave. It does not matter how much money one spends writing something in stone, it still needs to be confirmed. There are two errors on this stone. The father did not die in 1884, it was a different William Damon who died in 1884 in Leominster. The father actually died in 1883, admittedly in December, but the distinction is important, because of the other William Damon in the records. The daughter Annie G.Gibson did not die in 1879. She was listed in the 1880 census and according to a secondary source died in 1881. Note: at the time of writing, the Find A Grave page adds its own error on top of the ones on the stone, by saying son William lived 1835-1905. This, despite the stone saying William L. Damon died in 1855, a fact backed up by vital records. There are other examples of family memorial giving wrong information. One of the more embarrassing might be this one which gets the marriages of William Nickerson's children wrong. Also, this gravestone where the father is listed with the older brother Nathan's name but with the father Ebenezer's (approximate) dates and wife. This plaque apparently just copied from Bond, one of the more error-prone genealogists of any standing, without doing any significant research, and hence honored their forebear with an attractive collection of errors. The gravestone of Maude E Raymond has apparently been painted, in an attempt to change the birth year, despite her birth record, census and SSDI record giving the correct year??? Apparent modern gravestone, honoring a Revolutionary veteran, demotes captain to a lieutenant (see Person:Jonathan Houghton (7)), adding wrong death date as a result.

William Damon turned out to be an interesting case. There are at several in Worcester County. This is the late 1700's/early 1800's. So there isn't good secondary coverage (no DAR membership at stake), and the migration westward has started (the records are in dispersed locations), so the various Williams are easy to confuse. William Bennett Damon is the father of the above William. was born in Reading/Wakefield, and moved to Worcester county. The secondary source that covers his family made a 30-year typo in his birth date, and his age at death in the official death record is off more than usual, about 8 years too young, making it hard to match up birth and death in different towns. His son, above, is given two overlapping wives, one wrong, by the same secondary source mentioned above, but yet one of his actual two wives is not mentioned. This contributes to make it hard to distinguish him and his fellow citizen of Leominster, William C. Damon. The middle initial is often ignored by secondary sources, but proves the key, along with parent information on their death records. William Damon of Fitchburg was easier to figure out, but he did have a wife Lucy, so simple name matching could have resulted in mistakes with the William of the monument.

Sometimes, when only one such person is your descendant, you might be tempted not to study the others. This can be a mistake.

Good, Bad and the Ugly

Barnabas Wines seems like an unusual name to the modern ear. But it would be a mistake to simply lump all such references into one person. This is a good case in point, as discussed in the narrative. Careful study is needed to separate the various generations. Sometimes everything fits except for one small detail, but you can't simply ignore that one detail. So in this case, one author's assumption many years ago has created a myth that is hard to kill. Family:Nathaniel Moore and Sarah Vail (1) is another such myth. The wrong answer to these myths are much more common on the Internet than the right answer, and understanding why one answer's wrong takes some patience, determination, and discipline, and often makes one's head swim.

Person:Phebe Cornell (1). I spent a lot of time on this page because I know the submitter is capable of serious genealogy, having authored an article in Source:New England Historical and Genealogical Register. However, the page had no sources. Because of my respect for the submitter, I assumed it had some basis in truth, and spent two days investigating this. However, as the writeup shows, probably little, if anything, on this page is true, and it appears to have merely been copied from some unsourced website. For those that think posting anything is better than nothing, this should suggest they are wrong, because it can cause people to waste a lot of time. The more information about the source of information is posted, the more you can trust it. The corollary being, if there are no sources, don't trust it.

Family:James Dickinson and Rebecca Pickard (1). This was a fun page. Solomon Phipps married a daughter of John Pickard, named Hannah in all the records, but Hannah Pickard was born in 1670, 3 years after the date of marriage. But there is no birth record of any Hannah old enough to marry Solomon Phipps, so most people assumed Solomon married Rebecca, Hannah's older sister, whose marriage situation was otherwise unknown. One source had already suggested that the answer might be that there where two daughters of John Pickard named Hannah, because Solomon Phipps' wife died shortly after marriage in 1669, and it was possible her father simply re-cycled the name Hannah for his youngest daughter born in 1670. But the key was also showing that Rebecca was otherwise married. Two days of searching every reference to the father John Pickard turned up a son-in-law James Dickinson who had a wife Rebecca. To my knowledge, this was not previously known, not even in a single AFN file (usually every theory ever speculated, or otherwise concocted out of good or bad genealogy, is represented by at least one AFN). Quite exciting to realize there are still things to find.

Myth-Busting

Person:John Heywood (2). Two wildly different birth estimates exist in literature for this man, one resulting in him fathering a child at 77. If you arrange the sources by date, it appears that one of the dates originates from a single source, Pioneers of Massachusetts by Pope. Looking at the page (top of right-hand column), it appears that during printing, a typesetting error failed to separate two paragraphs about two different John Hayward's, and so everybody treats them as one person. Thus do errors take on a life of their own.

Bond and Savage are the source of many of these errors, as many speculations they made have become quasi-truth, even though there is not a shred of evidence to support them. Because these sources are so easy to access, and cover so many people in one book, they are sure to be copied by genealogists who care more about having an answer than whether they have the right answer. A good example is discussed on Person talk:Abigail Garfield (1). The will of John Garfield mentions a granddaughter named Sarah Parkhurst, and an Abigail married John Parkhurst, so it was assumed, apparently (no explanation given) that it was Abigail Garfield who married John Parkhurst (even though the same will says she was unmarried). Now-a-days we know the mentioned Sarah Parkhurst was the daughter of Sarah Garfield and George Parkhurst. No evidence remains to suggest Abigail Garfield married John Parkhurst, yet it continues to be repeated every where as if it were true. Meanwhile, all sorts of Abigail Garfields are made up to explain who it was that married Thomas Gleason. You must always ask, how do they know that? If you can't figure out the answer, there is still doubt there, no matter who is telling you it's so.

Another example, a myth created by Source:Morse, Abner. Memorial of the Morses, on Person:Samuel Morse (33), as discussed there. Too often part of the myth doesn't fit, and instead of throwing the whole thing out, people keep parts and often add mythical details that look good only because they clearly match the part that wasn't thrown out. Thus, based on part of Morse's error, Source:Tingley, Raymon Meyers. Some Ancestral Lines gives wife Hannah Whiting to the wrong Samuel Morse.

Early genealogists like Bond, Savage, and Morse, laid much of the foundation for what we currently know. But one has to realize it was more difficult for them to check the records compared to now when many records on available to a worldwide audience on the Internet, that they freely copied from other researchers without attribution because of the difficulty of personally inspecting the records, and they included assumptions based on partial or mistaken information without distinguishing them from facts supported by contemporary documents. In some ways, the most valuable thing WeRelate can do is document, and prominently flag such errors, to attempt to staunch the mindless propagation of such myths by "blind copyists" (from Jacobus' warning, "the genealogist should never allow his critical faculties to desert him and become a blind copyist").

Judging a Book by the Insides

We all know websites are unreliable. But books can be just as bad. Various rants may be found Source:Wheeler, Albert Gallatin. Genealogical and Encyclopedic History of the Wheeler Family in America, Source:Koleda, Elizabeth Potts. Gaskill Genealogy, Source:Moore, Arthur Clayton. Moore.

Identifying Wives

One of the hardest tasks in genealogy is to identify the parentage of wives. Identifying unknowns in my own history to focus on, I spent a lot of time on the wife of Solomon Reed trying to identify her parentage. Traditionally her name is given as Abigail Stoughton. As in the John Heywood case above, the first step was to find the oldest sources I could, and I discovered she is referred to as Abigail Houghton, and a reference to her gravestone, which gave an estimated birthdate that ruled out most likely candidates. Then a secondary source (written by a great-grandchild of hers) that gave her name as Abigail Horton, daughter of Samuel Horton of Connecticut. The step from Stoughton to Horton is unlikely, but Houghton to Horton is within the range of colonial spelling variation. What a find! The answer seemed right, it matched the estimated dates. I was happy, but there was no proof. In fact, marriage records of the area where the marriage probably occurred were lost, so it was likely none would be forthcoming, and her father died before her marriage ruling out a will. How would I convince somebody who thought differently? One day I was adding her grand-children, children of her son, but not in my line. What do I notice, but that one is named Samuel Horton Reed! A small thing, but inexplicable if the above isn't the right answer. Years of searching, and evidence was there all along if I had just broadened my exploration of the family a little more.

Abisha Phelps married Katharine Richardson. The only eligible lady found in the records is the daughter of Josiah Richardson. But her father died a year after she was born, her share of the probate went to her brother (presumably as guardian), so there is nothing there to identify who she married, say, 20 years later. The standard Richardson genealogy mentions this Katharine but has no further details (no marriage, not even a birth date). The gravestone of Abisha Phelp's wife shows her birthdate, a year after the baptism of Josiah's daughter, which is worrisome. Some websites (e.g. here, individual 56227) say Abisha's wife was Josiah's daughter, but how do they know? The same assumption made above, based on her being the only one in the records? What next? Research the family. First the siblings, then the father's siblings, then the mother's siblings. Here it gets ugly, because to determine the mother's siblings, we need the will of the grandfather. But the grandfather and great-grandfather, both named Ephraim Wilder, died a little more than a year apart, and their probates are connected and intermixed. But deep in the file is a petition where "Abis[ha] Phelps who acts for his mother in [law] Dorothy Greenleaf" i.e., Dorothy (Wilder) (Richardson) Greenleaf, the remarried widow of Josiah Richardson. This is proof, not assumption, that this is the correct Katharine Richardson.

Sybil Brigham, the daughter of Samuel Brigham and his first wife Abigail Moore, gets married to two different men (Ebenezer Goddard and Zachariah Maynard) by different websites. (Some websites even suggest the same woman married both, but they clearly didn't check the dates.) And sure enough, vital records list the brides of both men as Sybil Brigham. But non-Quaker marriage records rarely identify a parent, and so the question is which bride is the daughter of Samuel Brigham and Abigail Moore? What's interesting is that one of these Sybils is the great-grandmother of Brigham Young (Sybil m. Ebenezer Goddard, Susanna Goddard m. Phineas Howe, and Abigail Howe married John Young), and so one would expect she has been well studied. But apparently somebody forget to tell all the websites out there.

As usual with old secondary genealogies, the "History of the Brigham Family" provides no evidence or justification when it suggests an answer (Mr. Eleazer Goddard, presumably meaning Ebenezer). So can it be trusted? I looked in vain for some identification of the Sybil who married Zachariah Maynard, thinking the answer might lie there, but that Sybil Brigham is not even mentioned. If this source wasn't aware of the controversy, they probably didn't work too hard proving what they thought was the only possible answer. So probably their conclusion carries no weight. Considerable search of the Internet failed to turn up any mention of Samuel Brigham's will, which one might hope would identify his daughter's married name. Time to order film: 386033. And sure enough, the will of Samuel Brigham names "my beloved dafter Sibbel goddard". Too easy! Everybody knows wills are useful tools, but they remain under-utilized in genealogy. One can only presume it is because it involves a little work, few being online.

The other half of the Sybil puzzle is harder, as no records offer any clue of any other Sybil Brigham, much less the specific one who was the wife of Zachariah Maynard. Her age at death suggests a birth about 1722 and the only birth of any Sybil in that timeframe appears to be a Sybil Ward, not Brigham. But it seems unlikely that she would be marrying for the second time in 1739 when only 17 (actually earlier, her child was born in 1739). So it remains an open question, waiting for someone to solve. But note to all those descendants whose only desire is to fill in the parent blanks for this Sybil: Samuel Brigham and Abigail Moore is the wrong answer! Sorry, I know how much you all hate "Unknown".

Weird Case: Person:Stevens Hayward (1) married three sisters, from older to younger: first two as maidens, third as widow.

It often happens that a case that is thoroughly researched and put to bed is totally changed by the discovery that a husband had two wives by the same name. So William Norcutt had two wives, but we only know of Sarah Chapman. The question we don't know, is she the first wife or the second? She is the mother of his first child but his widow is named Sarah. This was complicated by bad postings that gave what appears to be a bogus death date, suggesting she was his second. However, in reality, that date belongs to her brother in law. The poster liked it so much he used it for Sarah and one of Sarah's sister as well. Ignoring that misdirection, it is now possible that she was his first wife, and he married a second lady named Sarah. Either that, or Sarah had 12 children over a 28 year span. For now, no answer.

Where There's a Will

Person:Experience Reed (3). Books say Silas Reed married Experience Joslin and her brother Joseph Joslin married Experience Reed. The will of Experience Reed says she was the widow of Silas Reed, but also names her siblings, which match those of Experience (Reed) Joslin. This shows it was one person marrying twice, so born Experience Reed, marrying to become Experience Joslin, then marrying again to return to Experience Reed. This was not rocket science, but I believe, it was an original contribution. She had no children, hence no descendants, so nobody ever seemed to have bothered to dig into this. At least, it never seems to have been so posted on the Internet.

Person:Peter Reed (7), Person:Peter Reed (8), and Person:Peter Reed (9): father, son and grandson, all Peter Reed of Littleton. Littleton town records showed 2 birth dates (the oldest was born in Lexington before moving to Littleton), five marriages and four death dates. There was no way to arrange the pieces to fit. The father and son are covered in Source:Reed, Jacob Whittemore. History of the Reed Family in Europe and America, but with confusion and not well enough to figure things out (disregarding that this is an error-filled work that cannot be relied on, and it did indeed turn out to have errors on these). Since they are not in the branch of Reeds descended from William Read of Weymouth, they are not covered in Source:Reed, John Ludovicus. Reed Genealogy, another error-filled genealogy. Fortunately the wills of Middlesex County are arranged in alphabetical order, so the probate files of all three were on one film. The short answer: the father had three wives, the last when over 70; the son died young making his only wife a widow; and the grandson's death was recorded twice with two different dates (the first preceded the will but named his widow, the second approrpiately followed the writing of the will but named no wife).

Wills are among the most reliable of sources, being reviewed by courts, and all parties having a financial motive to make sure things are above board, but occasionally there are issues:

  • Did Person:Grace Unknown (249) give her daughter's entire share to only one of her children, Mary Lawless, or did she mean to name the mother of Mary Lawless?
  • [to be located]Person named in will that died 11 years before the will was written: unusual

One Source is Good, More are Better

We're not talking about copying every tree posted by all the people who just got Ancestry as a Christmas present, but contemporary sources (don't like the word primary, no clear consensus on its meaning). Person:Oliver Peabody (5) has 3 different sources giving 3 different death dates. His birth date is unknown, and since there seems to be agreement about his age at death, this means three different birth estimates. Which impacts birth estimates for siblings. So, a lot hangs on finding which is the right death date. Sources 4 and 5 enable reasonable guesses to be made about the cause of errors in two of them, suggesting not only the right answer, but creating some confidence that it is indeed the one.

I intended to only do a superficial coverage of Family:Daniel Woodbury and Esther Wait (1), but something told me there was more to the story. The Royalston VRs show the birth of 3 children, one of whom died. After the death, the remaining two were baptized, and then a year later there was another child baptized but had no birth in the VRs. Sometimes, once families get out of the habit of reporting each birth, sometimes they never restart. So while there was nothing amiss, I decided to check the father's will to see if further children were indicated. He mentioned an only son, of whom there was no birth or baptism record, as his only child! The son's death record confirmed he belonged to this family and his birth was separated from the last baptism by a typical gap. This required double-checking but no searching yielded any possible death records or marriage records for any of the previous children. Apparently they all died before adulthood, one might suspect they are buried on the family farm, and apparently none of the deaths were recorded. What an unexpected twist that would have been missed if only the vital records were looked at.

Person:Ann Mayo (5) is living at home with her parents at age 48. Her gravestone is found in the nearby cemetery showing death date 9 years later. But no death is recorded in the town records. The Find A Grave memorial does not show a death location, only a burial location. The name is too common to simply try to find the same name. There is an Annie Mayo whose death is recorded the right year, but located in a different state. If you haven't studied the whole family, the connection would be hard to make, but knowing that her older sister lived there with her husband, Annie must have moved there after her parents died.

My Bad

My favorite story is probably always going to be Adam Brown Richardson. Went to sea at the age of 9 in 1843, obit. says born in New York City, later census data says parents from Scotland. I could only assume going to sea so young might signal his parent/parents died. I never thought I would figure out who his parents were. A newspaper article about one of his sons, talked about a James Richardson of Bermuda who was grandfather of Mrs. Richardson. Hoping this was a typo, meaning Mr., I started investigating James Richardson of Bermuda. Unfortunately, he did turn out to be the grandfather of Mrs. Richardson. But (with lots of help from User:LornaHen) he also turned out to be the half-brother of Adam (it appears so but perhaps not proved so, but in any event, as the result of the investigation, the parents of Adam were identified). So I made a mistake, but it led in the right direction. What a lucky break!

Colonial Handwriting

Until you've tried it, it's hard to realize how tricky deciphering colonial handwriting can be.

This page, in the birth of Joseph Procter, right side, half way down, is an example I have seen a couple of times, where ones were made with squiggly lines that looks like a 5. If there had been 55 days in a month, I am sure some of the more stylized cases would have been misread. Likewise, continental style ones, with an exaggerated lip, can look like an inverted V, and get mistaken for 7 (here, birth record of Nathan Hastings near bottom of left page), or a 4 (intentions of Henry Wise, note th further suggesting it is a 4); while 4's written without sharp corners looks like a 7, and vice versa (birth of Eliza Procter, death date of Edward Goss, death date of Ellen Perkins).

In older writing, 1600's, e's were often written like curl-le-ques going upwards, and are easy to mistake for other vowels. The confusion of May and Aug is surprisingly common because both start with peaked letters and end with tailed letters. (Example: this page originally had a dated entered as Aug, but inspection of the original record says May, and the date the marriage was registered was June.) The flourishes put on capital letters often make them hard to recognize, often including a loop that looks like a small e (see here, spelled Leivermore probably because L had loop on it that looked like an e; also line 1 of census entry where curley-ques on first and last name caused Edith Melendy to be indexed as Edith Mae Melendy), causing extra letters to be read that weren't intended by the writer. There are several cases of How and Stow being confused, for example. In the 1600's, it is not uncommon to see I used for J, and V for U, and the reverse.

Several lessons may be learned from Person talk:Damaris Spafford (1). First reading colonial writing, so the underlying problem was that an 8 erroneously read as zero. Then, the use of index makes it easy to find the wrong answer, whereas tracking down the original then forces redoing the analysis. Finally the use of index lost context and so combined with above, wife is mistakenly identified as daughter.

Secondary is Always Secondary

I have encountered people who cling to family trees compiled by now-deceased family members in the face of factual evidence and common sense to the contrary. For that reason, I love this quote of a woman describing her handed-down sources: "Aunt Carrie (my father's sister) was a bookkeeper and every entry in her tree was factual and sourced. Not so with my mother's sister's records. Her entries are a mix of family myths and Alzheimer's filtered stories of my great-grandmother's family bankruptcy and flight to New York in 1895." How to keep your own work from looking like "Alzheimer's filtered stories"? Carefully document how you know what you say.

There is a time when any genealogist gets tired of dealing with the unsourced, poorly researched, or naive postings that the Internet has made all too common. A natural reaction is to retreat to the work of respected genealogists and only accept the work of people the reader deems acceptable. For example, in New England, people often cite Donald Jacobus and Robert Charles Anderson, erasing all other sources, as if there is no other possibility. I have found errors in both of them. To try and expose the flaw in this approach, consider the following version of Person:Thomas Clapp (9), under the heading "Parents", then see the following analysis.

This post provides a good bibliography, and nothing it says is untrue, though the comments about Dean Smith's book refer to the work as a whole, and form no sort of warranty of any given fact found therein. In fact, this same book assigns a wife Abigail to Thomas' brother Nicholas, because she is named Abigail Clapp in probate documents for her first husband, but ironically, she is wife of not Nicholas, but exactly this Thomas, and this source should have recognized that error. In its defense, every genealogical study must draw boundaries and define who they study in depth, and who they just mention. This source studies Thomas in-depth, but just mentions Nicholas, hence an error on Nicholas slips through. Regardless of all this, though, this source is secondary, meaning, bottom line, the author did not live when Thomas did, and nothing he says is fact. We cannot believe everything he says, just because he is so highly respected. To quote Jacobus, "Finally, it is unwise to trust any genealogical book, however good its reputation, too far. There are mistakes in the best of them, and the genealogist should never allow his critical faculties to desert him and become a blind copyist." This author can only gain authority by mentioning facts that are based on verifiable, primary (first-hand) sources. In this case, the author did that for Thomas, as the current citation of Dean Smith's book on Thomas' page shows (added a day later). He did not choose to do so for Nicholas and his entry on Nicholas was incorrect.

But, focusing back on the post, note that there is no sign of a genealogical argument in this entire post. It was this: The original mistake was based on the mistated age of Thomas - that he himself gave in his own will - which would have made his birth precede the marriage of his correct parents. So people assigned him to parents who were actually married at the time of his calculated birth. Who would you believe: the man himself, or an author writing 300 years later? The supposed "outdated information" complained about in the post (being based on the person's own will) are ironically newer than the documents that are used to prove the the right answer (which include the will of his father showing he had a son Thomas; the will of his brother Edward whose parentage is known, referring to his brother Thomas and naming his children so there is no mistake about who he meant; and a deposition by Thomas himself, at a different time, giving a much younger age). The use of the term "outdated information" would only apply to people that work solely with secondary sources. In reality, the problem is caused by not having available all the pertinent primary sources. Dean Smith's book does seem to identify all of them, so it appears to get the right answer. But it is those sources, not Dean Smith, that form the proof of what the right answer to the genealogical issue is.

The flip side of this problem is captured by the phrase, "Sometimes a blind squirrel finds an acorn". Even when a source is often wrong, that does not mean it must always be wrong. I once corresponded with a person who refused to discuss my findings because they referred to Source:Roberts, Charles R. History of Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, and a Genealogical and Biographical Record of Its Families, because that encyclopedic work had made a mistake on that person's own ancestor. Years later, when reviewing a cousin of one of my ancestors, Person:Elias Schneider (9), I had been influenced to favor the historian of the local historical society based on the above criticism. But anomalies caused me to order probate files, and these primary sources showed that the encyclopedic coverage was correct, while the focused historian was not. Ultimately, you must find verifiable, primary documents that support your case. Use of a secondary source without that support is more a measure of how little effort you are willing to invest to find the truth for the person you are studying, than of the truth itself.

Most people do not realize how much assumption formed the basis of the secondary sources they use. I have significant respect for James Savage given the time he worked in, but his dictionary is clearly "outdated information". See Transcript talk:Savage, James. Genealogical Dictionary of the First Settlers of New England/v3p484. Often the mistakes in Bond's Watertown are easily shown by simply looking up contemporary records. See Anna Bigelow as given by Bond.

Bond is easy to pick on. For example, in another case, he says Hannah, wife of Nathaniel Fisk d. 21 Jul 1718. My research has led me to believe Hannah is likely the only candidate for the Hannah Fisk that married Ebenezer Daniels and I can find no death record for Hannah in 1718. Quickly a problem with Bond's presentation is found: Nathaniel and Hannah Fisk had a daughter Lydia b. in Sherborn in October 1718. How could she have died the July, and also give birth 3 months later? I'm trying to figure out why Bond thinks so (it is a fairly recent development, say post-1900, to have to explain yourself in genealogy), so I'm thinking he confused Nathaniel's wife Hannah Fisk with Hannah Fisk the widow of John Fisk. But Frederic Clifton Pierce, who wrote the Fisk-Fiske genealogy, says John's wife Hannah died in 1714. This is repeated by many books. Again, no death record can be found. So I look up the probate file for John to see if it indicates his widow Hannah was living in 1718. It turns out Pierce's statements are blatantly false! John's will leaves everything to his wife Hannah, mentions no children in his will, and makes his wife Hannah sole executrix. He died 6 Jun 1718. On 23 Jun 1718 (i.e. several years past 1714) his widow Hannah posts bond so she can serve as his executrix. I do not know what death record Bond saw to make him guess that Nathaniel's wife died in 1718, but I do know it was not Nathaniel's wife, and it could have been John Fisk's widow, as she did not die in 1714 despite what Frederick Clifton Pierce says. If you rely on secondary sources without finding and verifying the primary basis for the assertions given, you are going to be surprised by how often you end up being wrong.

Chase Genealogy adds fictitious wife to Person:Abraham Chase (21) based on birth of a daughter. But birth record was misread, the curley-que on the M interpreted as a C, so Mase turned into Chase. Further checking yields that first wife was still alive 9 years after the alleged marriage. Additionally, Chase Genealogy adds son Ezra who is administrator of the father's will. Seems like a strong basis until one reads the will and finds out that the administrator Ezra is only a friend, not a son. So in total, one fictitious wife and two fictitious children added by a source many people copy blindly (e.g., many AFNs give this information).

A classic case showing why sometimes chasing down the original source of information is so important is seen at Family:William Pollard and Hannah Whitcomb (1). Conflicting VRs presented two cases of children born less than 9 months apart. As one conflict was caused by a secondary source, it would have been easy to have ignored that one case, but it would have been a mistake. And yes, since the births were from a different family with a different surname, tracing this back did involve a lot of tedious page-turning looking for a birth record with the date in question, i.e., not simply searching by name.

Person:Tamasin Cook (1). A birth date of 16 Jun 1725 in Wrentham is given by Gary Boyd Roberts who has made a living rehashing other people's work. Since he is presenting a summary of the ancestry of all the presidents, he does not bother with sources, presumably to simplify his presentations. This was published in 2009 so should represent the current thinking, or close to it, right? This date is found in other secondary sources, including the Ballou Genealogy. So it's all agreed then? Well, no, it actually appears to be incorrect. Both the published and original records of Wrentham say Tamasin was born 17 (not 16) Jun 1725 in Mendon. But this was not recorded until 1738. The published and original Mendon records, probably recording the birth relatively contemporaneously, agree on the date of 17 Jun 1725. No record is found giving her a birth date of 16 Jun 1725. The oldest source giving 16 Jun is the Ballou Genealogy published in 1888, so it would appear the other sources merely copied this without any verification. How did the Ballou Genealogy get 16 Jun 1725? Well we don't know since they didn't provide their sources. But since they say the birth was "perhaps in Bellingham, perhaps in Wrentham" (i.e., don't know where it was), at best it appears that it was a non-contemporary source, such as information submitted by a descendant. Alternately, since the source is secondary, we can't rule out that it is just a typo, plan and simple.

Emperor's New Clothes

The following situation was noticed by GenealogyGuy78 (dmaxwell).

Person:Stephen Foote (1) is listed in genealogies as a twin to his brother Isaac, b. 14 Dec 1672 in Branford, CT.

In 1849, Source:Goodwin, Nathaniel. Foote Family, or, the Descendants of Nathaniel Foote, One of the First Settlers of Wethersfield, Conn, p. 174, indicates the birth of the twins with the comment "Birth recorded on Branford records".

In 1860, Source:Savage, James. Genealogical Dictionary of the First Settlers of New England, 2:181, repeats this claim, giving no source.

In 1907, Source:Foote, Abram William. Foote Family : Comprising the Genealogy and History of Nathaniel Foote, of Wethersfield, Conn., and His Descendants; Also a, p. 29 and p. 32 repeats the same thing with no identification of where the information came from.

In 1926, Source:Jacobus, Donald Lines. Families of Ancient New Haven, Vol. 3, p. 607 gives the same birth, citing "BdV", meaning "Vital statistics, Branford" according to page p. 3:514.

In 1943, Source:Ferris, Mary Walton. Dawes-Gates Ancestral Lines, p. 342, shows the same birth, citing Savage as the source.

Note that Stephen's death record says he died in 1762 in his 90th year, more or less in line with the above.

In 2019, dmaxwell looked up the scanned image of the Branford birth records of Robert Foote's children, which he located here in the Branford Land Records, Vol. 1, p. 174. And it says:

John the sonne of Robert ffoot was borne ye 24 July 1670
Isaac the sonne of Robert ffoot was borne the 14 decemb 1672

No Stephen! No twin! Perhaps Stephen is on a different page? Well, looking failed to find him, and most convincingly, no Stephen is listed anywhere in Barbour's coverage of Branford records, providing confirmation that we did not simply miss his record.

It is fairly easy to see what probably happened. Goodwin noted Isaac's birth came from Branford records (note the singular form of birth in his comment), and probably in a last minute edit, added Stephen as a twin based on his age at death. This is clearly an assumption being presented as a fact, and places way too much confidence in age at death, which does not have enough precision for this assumption. This should have been quickly caught by later genealogists, but hating not knowing, everybody kept copying the source giving an answer, sure their predecessors saw something to justify their claim, but never checking. Some of these authors are considered top-flight genealogists, and still this happened. Jacobus' error was the worst, as he cites a source he apparently never looked at.

The fact that Stephen is apparently not a twin of Isaac, that he may have been born around 1674 or so, instead of 1672, does not really affect our understanding of him (well, it could remove our proof of his parentage, but does not, since two deeds verify that Robert is his father 2:130 and 2:225). It really only concerns our faith in secondary sources. Two of the above explicitly indicated this birth was found in the Branford records, and clearly none of them bothered to check. Only Ferris correctly indicated where her data came from, but citing an unsourced secondary source still basically leaves us with no source, free to unknowingly perpetuate a myth caused by egregious assumption.

Your Bad

Person talk:Samuel Fletcher (23). Littleton Records, in the section of genealogical notes (i.e., not actual vital records, but the research of Samuel Smith) which says "Children of Samuel and Mary (Lawrence) Fletcher: Samuel b. Sept 8 173-, d. Oct 30 1749." Somehow, Samuel gets entered into WeRelate with these dates (including literally a birth in "173-") as the husband of Mary Lawrence, i.e, the son marries his mother. Something is wrong, but since no source was cited, it is hard to get started sorting it out, until stumbling across the Littleton Records entry (clearly recognizable because of the "173-" date copied faithfully into WeRelate). Samuel Fletcher (1707-1780) of Westford m. Mary Lawrence of Littleton, and they spent their entire married life in Westford and had 15 children, all of whom (including son Samuel born in "1730") have their birth recorded in the town's vital records, a more primary source, and also one concerned with the town where the family actually lived.

Person talk:Thomas Parke (24). As the talk page indicates, this page is so clearly wrong, it is obvious just by reading the page. But further, it is so mangled each fact almost appears to go with a different person. This appears to be copied from the first web page found mentioning the target person, and the submitter was too embarrassed to admit to which source was used? Meaning they should have known not to use it. Of course, even when you cite a source, relying on just one source is never a good practice.

The following are lists of pages illustrating certain bad practices. For errors, as opposed to odd situations, use of the history may be necessary in some cases to find a version before the page was "fixed".

The proper way to do Savage and his corrections (so if somebody is looking at an uncorrected copy, they will realize why it is different): Person:Bridget Fitch (1).

Fraud

I have not encountered many cases of fraud. More likely is simply assumption promoted to fact and superficial name-matching. However, there is some.

Death Date, No Marriage

Person:Ruth Wright (9): death date given, no marriages documented, death is recorded under name of 2nd marriage: obviously somebody just copied what was wanted to fill in a blank without regard to chain of proof.

Person:Clary Sherman (1), this version, carefully documented birth date, but gives death date with no source, no indication of marriages. Appears (I'm still waiting for reply on talk page) that this wasn't her death date at all.

Impreciseness of Age at Death

Person:Lydia Spaulding (5): Age 88, and in 88th year, both used on same person, presumably meaning the same age. But meanings differ by 1 year. Inherent ambiguity of any death record: which did they really mean?

An old version of Person:Jedidah Hawes (2) shows a birth date on exactly the same day of the year that the person died, citing WFT as the source. Since the real birthdate is known and this isn't it, we can conclude that the birth date is derived from age at death by simple subtraction. But instead of using a "cal" or "abt" qualifier, it was misrepresented as the actual birthdate. (Thus is Internet genealogy polluted with lazy, naive research.) In any event, since the age at death is in her 56th year, she was only 55, and the calculation was based on the misinterpretation of 56th year as meaning having attained age 56 when it means having finished 55 complete years, and being somewhere in the 56th year, so only age 55 and not yet 56.

Of course, the first requirement is to copy the age at death correctly. This page used a misread age at death found on a Find A Grave page with no gravestone image and built the entire family around this single erroneous fact. The result was that the estimated births of the parents were after the actual birth date of their daughter, since she lived to the age of 25, not 5, as was copied.

Colonial Spelling

It continues to surprise me how much stock people place in colonial spelling. All it takes is a small exposure to realize it was phonetic, unregulated, variable and unreliable.

Person:Ignatius Meriam (1)

Born as Ignatius Marion, baptized as Ignatius Meriam. Same father in both cases, so why the difference? Because it reflects the spelling of the writer, not the person. The writer in one case is the town clerk, in the other case the church clerk.

Married as Ignatius Marion, children born to Ignatius Marion, but died as Ignatius Mariam. Why the change? Because he moved to a new town, so the death is recorded by a different town clerk that had no previous records to copy from, and phonetically Marion sounds like the more common Meriam. Hence, this line of a family that is not Meriam, now all spell their name Meriam (or Merriam). But if you want to find the old records for this family, you better remember to check under Marion!

Family:Nathaniel Gleason and Lucinda Gleason (1) is interesting because both parties have the same surname. In Petersham, where Lucinda is from, the intention spells both surnames as Glesen. In Hardwick, where Nathaniel is from, the intention spells both surnames as Gleason. In either single town, both people get the same spelling. The difference is the town the intention was recorded in, showing how the spelling was determined by the town clerk.

Person:Joseph Barrett (9) (or just about any colonial Barrett)

More than most names, Barrett seems to have been spelled in many different ways. There is a big collection of Barretts from the town of Chelmsford, Mass. The vital records for that town include sections spelled: Barett, Barit, Barite, Baritt, Barrat, Barratt, Barret, Barrett, Barrit, Barrite, and Barritt.

Joseph's birth is recorded as Barrett, his death as Barrat. In one town, his marriage is recorded under Barrett, in his wife's hometown as Barratt. The births of his brothers and sisters are found variously under Barett and Barret. Joseph's own children are found variously under Barit, Barratt, Barret, Barrit.

There is a period in the late 1700's where mostly nicknames and names were interchangeable, but the nicknames were being to be used as names in their own right, which can make things very confusing. Even if one can follow a person, it doesn't mean the town clerk was adverse to using the variant form. Hence the family of Family:Joseph Heald and Marcy Unknown (1). They had a daughter Mary, and a daughter Mercy. Both seemed to go by Mercy in most records, but each has at least one record calling her Mary. If they weren't 10 years apart, it probably would have been impossible to tell who married whom.

Garbage In/Garbage Out

Saying so doesn't make it so. You don't find the truth by voting, so counting how many secondary source made the same mistake does not win the race. While you can assess bad sources for plausibility, only evidence shows what is true. So when faced with a hodge-podge of errors, propagated over generations, repeated by countless people unwilling to accept unknown as an answer, the only thing to do is to start collecting facts supported by primary documents. You must ignore the rest until you have a foundation of fact to build on.

Unbelievable

First version of Person:Ann Walker (7): one editor, untouched by merge or edit for 6 years until 2013. I guess the lack of activity is no surprise: who could recognize a person born 1644, baptized 1638, d. 1681, and buried 1775 (must have been smelly by then) as their ancestor? Ann Walker turns out to be her married name (first husband) and so this is essentially all fiction.

Why even bother to create this page? Talk about no extra effort! [1]

One source listed the wife of Luther Brown as Elizabeth. All records says Sarah or Sally, etc. So a page is created with the name Elizabeth and alternate names Sarah and Sallee. Sarah and Elizabeth are never interchangeable names, so the hair on somebody's neck (besides mine) should have been raised, but no, a birthdate close to right was found for "Elizabeth Smith Peabody", which being prior to the use of middle names, was clearly a married name, not a birth name (Elizabeth Smith married Joseph Peabody), but in order to satisfy the one source that said Elizabeth, it was added, making one source's error less like reality than it already was.

Middle names

Building on a detail in the above set, middle names were not common until about the Revolutionary War. Often the middle name was a surname, usually of the person a child was named after. Some genealogists got in a bad habit of using the mother's maiden name as a middle name, presumably to help them keep several ancestors of the same name straight, but these get posted to the Internet in that form and take on a life of their own. Often, as above, it signals confusion between two different people with different given names. It is so bad, that often use of middle name much before 1800 becomes a red flag warming of bad research.

Here is a case where the desire to impose the modern practice of middle names is so strong, it misrepresents an otherwise clear record. Here is the death record of a "Mr Stephen Holden" which is indexed as Wm Stephen Holden, possibly causing problems searching for this record.

Lack of Sources

Human error is inevitable. Even if everybody was equally well-trained in genealogy instead of relying on the easiest sources, and always worked exhaustively to find the truth instead of taking the first answer found with no further search, errors would creep in due to simply human error. One of the subtler benefits of sources it that it makes it harder to do this: you have to type something twice, and if you do it honestly, both from the original, it acts like confirming your password.

Person:Elizabeth Holden (15) died 23 Jul 1874 by record, and her husband remarried in 1879, providing qualitative confirmation of that fact. As of writing, the Find A Grave page gives the death date as 23 Jul 1894, with no picture. Clearly a simple typo, or possibly, a misreading of the stone. But with no picture, people that only see the Find A Grave site will be awfully confused.

The Authority to Estimate

Estimating dates should be based on some information, i.e., an educated guess, and not merely be made up. For that reason, estimates can actually be somewhat hard to do, as they often require more research, not less, than cases where the actual data is found. Collaboration suggests that anything much more elaborate than an age at death calculation should be explained so that subsequent readers can understand the limits of what is known, and what is not known. Two examples of bad estimating: [2] and [3].

Some Things are Unknowable

Many times records of some events cannot be found. Who knows if the record was never made, was lost, or has been misindexed and not found? But one the problems most people have with genealogy is dealing with fuzzy situations. They don't like not having a single answer. This is particularly true in many books who insist on pairing husbands and wives in order to tie up loose ends, rather than because there is evidence connecting them. This is great if explanations are provided, but often they are not, and the assumption inadvertently gets promoted to fact. This is why it is important to add Before, After, and About qualifiers to dates if appropriate. There is a discussion on Person talk:Joane Clark (1) that touches on this.