Person talk:Ebenezer King (10)

This page is all wrong [31 May 2012]

I was investigating an Ebenezer King, and wanted to rule out this page as a possible duplicate. In the process, I discovered this page is so wrong that I can't resist documenting it. For all people who believe you can trust genealogy found on the Internet without trying to confirm it against primary records, beware, it is made up of cases like this. Since the listed source is Ancestry Family Trees, apparently paying for your data is no guarantee that it is correct.

The page says

• name Ebenezer King
• b.11 Oct 1700 in Charlestown, Suffolk, Massachusetts, USA
• d.1790 in Phillipse Patent, Putnam, New York, USA
• m. "Sarah Jane Celide"
• son Consider King b. 1738.
• [no parents, no marriage date or marriage location given]

• On 11 Oct 1700, Ebenezer King was born in Watertown to parents Ebenezer King and Hannah Manning according to Watertown Records
• In Charlestown, Ebenezer King was born 13 Mar 1725/26 to Samuel King and Johannah King (nephew to above) according to Charlestown VRs
• Consider King was born 13 May 1738 to Ebenezer and Sary King in Rochester, Mass. according to Rochester VRs
• The Ebenezer King who d. 1790 in Phillipse Patent was Ebenezer King, s/o John King and Bathshua Snow, b. Harwich 1700, m. Mercy Merrick, according to MF5G.
• Celide is not found in the surname list for Mass. Vital Records. Nor is a single instance found in the entire NEHGS vital record database.

Clearly this page is pieces of data taken from many (at least four) different Ebenezer Kings with no apparent bias towards any one.

One source, which appears to be reliable, says this about Ebenezer King of Rochester: "Dates and places of birth, death and marriages not known. He married, first, Sarah; second, Jane." It appears that this Ebenezer King was the son of Ichabod King and Hannah Wetherell, who themselves married in Scituate about 1701, moved to Middleborough about 1711 where the wife died 1715 and Ichabod remarried 1716 to Judith (Bates) Gibbs [widow of Job, daughter of Samuel] and then moved to Rochester about 1733, according to Middleborough Church Records. Ichabod had a brother Ebenezer (Scituate VRs, b. 1685, so probably too old himself to be Consider's father). Although there was no record of a son Ebenezer, it figures Ichabod might name one son Ebenezer after his brother, and since there is a gap from late 1706 to early 1712 where Ichabod had no children recorded, it would be a perfect time to have a son whose first known child of his own was born 1735. Both Ichabod and Ebenezer used the somewhat uncommon name Hopestill for sons, which might suggest a family relationship.

About the only thing that appears right on the page, was that Ebenezer was the father of Consider. --Jrich 12:37, 30 May 2012 (EDT)

I have erased most of the wrong data and added his correct parents. I did just enough so that he won't show up on the duplicate report looking like a duplicate of one of the other Ebenezer Kings. This page is still waiting for an interested party to do a thorough job. --Jrich 18:47, 31 May 2012 (EDT)