Person talk:Richard Park (6)

From Thomas Parke (24): Who is this? [8 August 2012]

It is notable that the birth date is after the death of the father (Original version, now fixed).

No sources, no locations, imprecise dates all conspire to make this nearly impossible to match. Especially since it appears to be horribly confused when compared to actual sources.

Richard Parke (the man who married Sarah Collier as his second wife, but she was not the mother of any of his children) had a son Thomas, but he was born 1629 based on a deposition and married Abigail Dix. So there was no son of Richard Parke and Sarah Collier, and the son Thomas of Richard Parke, clearly was not born in 1666 and did not marry anybody in 1699.

The son Thomas and his wife Abigail had a son named Richard (not Thomas), b. Newton, in 1663 (not 1666) who married "Sarah King, a step-daughter of James Cutler" (not Cutter). This per the Genealogy of the Parke Families of Massachusetts by Frank Sylvester Parks, available for free viewing at archive.org. This appears to be who this page intends to represent. But it is hard to tell based on the information given.

This Richard (not Thomas) and Sarah (King, not Cutter) Park had their first child was born in 1690 (not 1699) according to the VRs of Newton.

There are other Parks in Massachusetts and Connecticut as well, so one can never be sure if one has captured the intent of the page, since locations are missing, but no source jumps out that appears to match a Thomas Park with a Sarah Cutter in any of the usual places (except one unsourced website). --Jrich 00:16, 7 August 2012 (EDT)

Apparently this page was created solely to be a link target for Transcript:Savage, James. Genealogical Dictionary of the First Settlers of New England/v3p347:

RICHARD, Cambridge 1636, ... d. at Cambridge vill. (where he had liv. 18 yrs.) 1665, leav. will of 12 July in that yr. provid. for w. Sarah, wh. had been wid. of Love Brewster ... two ds. and only s. Thomas.

RICHARD, Newton, gr.s. of the preced. and s. of Thomas, by w. Sarah Cutter, had William; Thomas, 7 Feb. 1690, both d. young; prob. Abigail, 25 July 1693; Richard, 1 Mar. 1696; and Sarah, 11 May 1699, d. soon; all b. at N.; rem. to Concord, m. 1699, Elizabeth d. prob. of John Billings, had ...

Which kind of explains the problem. First Savage was pretty confused about this family. And second, what Savage says was not faithfully transmitted to this page. I am embarking on trying to clean up this mess. --Jrich 19:36, 29 March 2014 (UTC)

I believe the Richard Park mess has been at least arranged into a probable presentation, even if some i's need dotting, t's need crossing. I am sure many readers looking at this page wonder why has the talk message from a Thomas Park been merged onto the Talk for Richard Park. So I will provide a brief closing summary.

This page was originally the result of the poster misparsing Savage and pairing the wife of Thomas' son Richard to the father Thomas, instead of to the son. Since the wife was really Richard's wife, the Family page was merged with Richard and Sarah, and for simplicity, the empty Thomas page that contained only a name, was merged with the correct name, Richard. The talk page just came along in the process. This mistake would probably not have been made if even one other source had been consulted for context and verification.

On top of that misreading, Savage was horribly wrong about this family, mashing the lives of four people named Richard Park/Parke/Parkes into two biographies and creating one of those never-dying myths that seem to result from his work more than anybody else's. (He was not alone in creating this particular myth, in that he copied considerably from Henry Bond.)

In straightening out this myth, too many researchers would hold dear some part of Savage's presentation without knowing what it was based on. So people would fix one part, but still perpetuate another of the error, in effect, creating new and competing myths and making the waters murkier (e.g. there never was a person named Sarah King, step-daughter of James Cutler). The best of them, Frank Sylvester Parks, has 3 of the 4 Richards right, but still pairs one Richard Parks with the step-daughter of James Cutler without asking, why do I think this is true? If he did, he would have realized it cannot stand up to the facts.

George Tolman, an underrated genealogist in my opinion, did some excellent work, but made one too many assumptions. Robert Charles Anderson has figured things out, but his limited scope means he only presented parts of it in print (the immigrant in his own right, the next Richard is listed in James Cutler's entry, the other two are not treated). --Jrich 17:24, 31 March 2014 (UTC)