Person talk:Martha Unknown (203)

No evidence for her surname - removing it [13 February 2024]

There appears to be no evidence for her surname. Older published genealogies and the cited sources don't give one, and I can't find any relevant reference to a Martha Jacob/Jacobs in a journal available at AmericanAncesters.org and published in the last 50 years. The identity of her parents is even more shaky - the father has a given name that is usually female, and the information on her mother's page was copied from a tree that says her father was 17 and her mother 45 when she was born - not impossible, but would need proof. All this information appears to be copied from amateur genealogies.

Since we aim for high quality genealogy at WeRelate, information on people born this far back should be supported by citations from reliable sources. For this reason, I am removing Martha's surname and deleting her parents. I will also improve the source citations.--DataAnalyst 15:35, 11 February 2024 (UTC)

There is still no evidence for her surname. The FamilySearch Family Tree L51R-R2P (FamilySearch Family Tree) shows evidence that a Maud Jenkins married a John Pierce in Wiltshire, but then calls this person Elizabeth Maud Jenkins (two given names was quite unusual at this time and usually reflects conflation of 2 different people) and shows her also married to a Martje Jacobs (which is usually a female name), with no source. Both "husbands" died in 1643 (in places quite far apart in English terms). Most people looking at this family would question the accuracy of the data, but it appears to have been copied to several amateur trees nevertheless. Regardless of how many times it is copied, it does not constitute the kind of reliable evidence we seek at WeRelate.

WeRelate continues to exist because it provides an alternative to FamilySearch, which unfortunately is still burdened by decades of bad data and ill-advised merges from the old Ancestral File. We strive to keep our data in better shape. Making changes to WeRelate based on bad FamilySearch data interferes with, rather than promotes, our mission.

If you have reliable published sources (not just "published" on the internet), please add them. If you need help distinguishing between reliable and unreliable sources, please reach out for help. In the absence of reliable sources, I will remove the surname again - even though she might not have existed, the information should reflect the original supposition just in case someone does find evidence for a Richard and Martha Pierce of Bristol, England.--DataAnalyst 21:44, 13 February 2024 (UTC)