Person talk:Unknown (27998)

Name [6 November 2012]

George:

The name on this page was "unknown" based on Great Migration's analysis. Your edit gives a name based on a source about which nothing is provided so we can't evaluate it. The inclusion of the middle name in this era makes the information very suspect. Please provide additional information about the source and the analysis provided within it.

If the reliability of Great Migration cannot be improved upon, the name should be listed as an "alt name" with a note that this is the most common name given online, but that no one offers any primary evidence for it.

Also, please be careful when making these edits to move sources accordingly. After this edit, the page reads as if the name Hannah Hills is sourced to Great Migration, which is incorrect. (The same thing happened on the family page.) --Amelia 23:19, 5 November 2012 (EST)

Hi Amelia,

I'm very happy to find a high level of scholarship in this part of WeRelate. I'm working on some early English/Norman ancestors and the game there seems to be to connect to nobility, historical sense be damned.

I added a couple of refs to the name of this person. I also removed the middle name as it is not given in the more reliable of the two sources (Stephen M. Lawson).

In this case Lawson does not explicitly state a source for this name, however he seems to rely on le Despencer, Newsletter of the Spencer Family Association, by Flora Spencer Clark, for the early American Spencers. I do not have ready access to this source to check if a primary source of this name is indeed cited there.--ggp 11:07, 6 November 2012 (EST)

I have attempted to contact Steve Lawson, but his stated email address is no longer valid and it is quite possible that he is now deceased (last update to the web page in question was in 2010). I am going to go ahead and revert the identification of G. Spencer's wife to "unknown" since there is no record evidence indicating that he married a daughter of any William Hills. The William Hills of Roxbury and Hartford who came to N.E. in 1632 did have a daughter Hannah, but she was not born until 1658 and married Thomas Kilbourn of Hartford.--jaques1724 23:16, 5 February 2014 (UTC)