Family talk:Edward Adams and Lydia Penniman (1)

Clutter [6 May 2011]

I started out trying to pretty up the citations so they were more usable: using the cite template within the Torrey citation to tie each cryptic tag to the specific citation of its source, and add an abstract of each citation so that it would indicate to the reader of the page, the gist of its contribution. I had completed about 10 when I encountered an edit conflict as more citations were added, but I am not going to repeat it. Instead I am going to point out that every citation I saw presented not one shred of authentic evidence of who the wife is, some said Rockwood, some said Pennington, and the smart ones said Lydia ---. As far as I can tell, the GMB citation sums up the state of knowledge better than all the rest combined, and adding all these citations of secondary sources giving no evidence (especially without an abstract indicating what each citation supports) strikes me as so much clutter and busy work. It is not improving the page, and if someone is interested in finding them, they only have to obtain a copy of Torrey's marriages, probably at their local library if they can't get it online, and they know everything all those citations tell them. How do these dozen or so hapless citations help? --Jrich 11:00, 6 May 2011 (EDT)

Hopefully my rearrangement serves your purpose of identifying which cryptic tag is which source acceptably, while serving mine of preventing people from driving to some distant library to look up, say, the Vinton Memorial, only to discover it merely says Edward Adams m. Lydia ---. The sources given on a page really should be the essential reading list. At a minimum, if one feels compelled to list exhaustively all mentions of a person, each should be accompanied by an abstract, so the reader gets a pretty good idea of how valuable the source might be to their research. For example, just knowing the NEHGR article cited was a memorial of some NEGHS member, would be sufficient to tell me to ignore it. --Jrich 12:21, 6 May 2011 (EDT)

1) I wasn't finished. I'll post an indication next time that more information is coming.

2) The "hapless citations" were an attempt to comprehensively present a controversy I'm still trying to educate myself on: namely, that there is" not one shred of authentic evidence of who the wife is". Torrey himself includes those citations to support his measured judgement that Rockwood is "probably" wrong, not certainly, not evidently. If he hadn't included those citations, would you say he was a secondary source giving no evidence? I think people have the right to not accept someone's judgement without the opportunity to follow the evidence that led to that judgement.

3) The sources duplicated Torrey's citation order.

4)Yes, one can pay to obtain a printed copy of Torrey (without his citations). I joined NEHGS to get them. I spent time chasing down the citations. You believe in saving time; I'm was trying to save people time and money. Nearly all of the sources are available free on the eminently “green” internet, no car required. BTW, If you know a free repository for Torrey why not add the link?

5) "just knowing the NEHGR article cited was a memorial of some NEGHS member, would be sufficient to tell me to ignore it” does tell me how experienced you are, but not how you know that all memorials are worthless. Torrey saw fit to include it.

6) You counseled me this week on “form”: I’m sorry I myself haven’t warranted that courtesy.--Brear47 16:14, 6 May 2011 (EDT)

I wasn't complaining about the edit conflict, it happens now and again, and I am the worse about doing edits in drib and drabs. The mention of it was merely to explain that your citations actually caused me to try and look them up, and that I found several, and that I wasn't responding without knowledge of what most (admittedly not every single one) of the sources say. Hence the question why you think it is helpful to a reader of this page to list 15 sources that left Torrey still unsure? (Assuming you are not citing sources you haven't actually looked up. And assuming you are not using WeRelate as a personal worksheet. These last two practices not being quite proper.)

The problem with listing the citations is that they obscure the quality, which in this case is Anderson. After you read Anderson, you are capable of saying why he thinks so, of assessing whether your evidence is strong enough to overcome his argument, etc. If you had included abstracts of what each of the 15 sources you added actually supported, it would not have been so bad, as it would give a reader some way to assess which ones are worthwhile sources and which are not. But it appears to a reader that there are a whole bunch of things that they need to look up before they can feel like they are aware of everything that was considered in building this page. In this case, that would be a colossal waste of their time.

Not all works are out of copyright and hence not all are available for public viewing on the Internet. Tingley-Meyers, for example, might require a trip to the library for some people. This source cited by Torrey, on p. 125, very convincing writes that James Allen married 1673 Lydia, daughter of Edward and Lydia (Rockwood) Adams, and on p. 248, overwhelms us with Joseph Daniel m. 3rd Lydia, widow of James Allen, daughter of Edward and Lydia (Rockwood) Adams. Not exactly a rewarding find, given $4+/gal. gas prices.

I haven't found a memorial that spends its time giving proof. I am not even aware whether the genealogy was done by the subject, or the author, and wonder what would be the polite thing to do if their work differed. That Torrey cited this particular one, "He was descended ... through Edward², 1630-1716, of Medfield, Mass., whose wife was Lydia Rockwood", shows how little evidence Torrey had found.

There was some value in identifying the sources for those readers that do not have a copy of Torrey handy to translate the cryptic tags (though finding a copy of Torrey is not hard). That is why I kept all the sources you looked up as links from each of the Torrey citations to the appropriate source page. Also, I believe thoroughly in the exhaustive search called for by the GPS, but that doesn't mean I want to see it on a WeRelate page. As a reader, I want a distilled version. --Jrich 21:04, 6 May 2011 (EDT)

From Jonathan Adams and Lydia Penniman (1): Adams husband of Lydia Penniman [27 September 2013]

This marriage, if true, refutes the basis for Lydia Penniman as the first wife of Edward Adams b 1629 put forth in Great Migration. Does the creator of this page have a source? --Brear47 13:29, 23 February 2011 (EST)

This submitter usually just says MySource:Lynn Nelson/Family Records of JaAnna Nelson which is like a GED file, or ftw file, essentially, and in my experience has a large occurrence of errors, similar to this. Also, looking into Edward's brother Jonathan, he is married to Elizabeth at the time Lydia was called Lydia Adams in her mother's will. So I'm going to merge this into Edward and Lydia. --Jrich 22:59, 27 September 2013 (UTC)