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[add comment] [edit] WelcomeWelcome to WeRelate, your virtual genealogical community. We're glad you have joined us. At WeRelate you can easily create ancestor web pages, connect with cousins and other genealogists, and find new information. To get started:
If you need any help, we will be glad to answer your questions. Just go to the Support page, click on the Add Topic link, type your message, then click the Save Page button. Thanks for participating and see you around! --Support 03:37, 16 February 2016 (UTC) [add comment] [edit] Documenting errors [22 January 2019]By weird circumstance I happened to review Recent Changes the other day and noticed your change to Person:Jedediah Sage (1), and it being in Massachusetts where I do a lot of work, I investigated. The history shows this addition, where you cite an Ancestry database and indicate that it says "Sage, Jedediah Sr., age 63, husband of Lucy. 17 Apr 1798", adding a comment "(do not confuse with Jedediah Jr., husband of Diantha who died in 1804)". Now this intrigued me because how could any one get confused if the death record actually calls him husband of Lucy. My first stop was ma-vitalrecords.org where they have the published vital records of Sandisfield, and find out that on p. 106, it actually says, SAGE, "Jedediah, husband of Diantha, April 17, 1798 aged 63 years". Hmmm, the vital records say the opposite of your comment. At this point, most experienced genealogists would tend to favor the vital records over a comment accompanied by an inaccurate presentation of what the record says. A few may choose to pursue things a little more to see why the confusion... Checking for marriages I find in Middletown, CT, a Jedediah Sage 1755 Lucia Smith, a Jedediah Sage m. 1763 Sarah Mercy and in New Marlboro, MA, a Jedidiah Sage m. 1787 Diantha Wright. The man dying 1798 age 63 would be born 1735 and one or all three of these marriages could belong to him. When did Lucy (Smith) Sage die? The page says 1815 but no sources are shown. Perhaps it was a daughter or a different Lucy Sage. Well, Find A Grave is an easy source to find (and probably should have been posted to Lucy's page), so I can see Lucy died 1815, so her husband clearly did not marry Diantha. But this does not show that her husband was the Jedediah who died 1797 or 1804 or maybe another Jedediah. Jedediah Jr.'s gravestone in 1804 does not indicate if her was married (his memorial page says his wife is Diantha but that is somebody's personal research, unproven, and as it turns out with Find A Grave, sometimes wrong). The one thing that is found is that Jr. is about the same age as Diantha, though plenty of older men took younger wives as their second wives, so this is not at all conclusive. You did post a source, and it is not the source I used above. Perhaps you transcribed that source correctly? Is it the original and the published records mistranscribed them? I can't tell. Unfortunately, while your citation is pretty thorough, you identify the source in a way that is really not all that helpful to someone who does not belong to Ancestry, like myself. I believe, in WeRelate terms, it is Source:Sandisfield, Berkshire, Massachusetts, United States. Town and Vital Records, 1746-1894, which lists three film numbers, one of which I believe is your source (a significant number of Ancestry images are found on familysearch films, Ancestry merely adding an index to make them searchable). I made a trip to a nearby library to borrow their institutional account of Ancestry, and I find it is a hand-written manuscript, apparently a copy of the original records made by town clerk? DAR volunteer? And on the page that you cited, if I copied it right, it says Sage Jedediah husband of Diantha Sage died April 17th 1797 aged 63 years At this point, your argument is looking pretty weak. In the margin of the handwritten manuscript, it says Vol. 1, p. 354. This refers to the original town records. For Sandisfield, the vital records are intermixed with town business, and hundreds of pages long, so this pointer is critical. The original is another one of the three films mentioned above, and unlike the one you used, this is available online, at familysearch.org (you need an account but it is free). The page in the records is here. I will attempt a transcript. Jedediah Sage Departed this Life 17th April 1798 AE 63. [People not used to reading old records might not be aware, but D'o is an abbreviation for "ditto", meaning to the same parents.] Now, at no point, do any of these records say that the Jedediah who died 1798 was the husband of Lucy, as your post appears to suggest they did. But now it is apparent he was not the husband of Diantha, and therefore, he likely was the husband of Lucy. We see that the person who made the handwritten manuscript assumed this was the register of a single family and the Jedediah who died 1798 was the father of the family described, instead of father of the father. A little common sense comparison with dates, or even better, a more literal transmission of the information could have avoided confusing other people, but, like many writers, their embellishments made their assumption appear to be fact. So why this long-winded post when it turns out you were right? I think this is an interesting case study about sources, but beside that, I think the morale is that posts need to be written with the reader in mind. So, in this case, the reason why there is confusion needed to be explained, then the analysis and evidence that leads to the correct answer needs to be provided. When citing sources, one should always credit the source with what it says and only that. Place your correction in brackets or in a note field or use some mechanism that clearly indicates it is not part of the source content, so that the reader is not confused by what the source is saying, versus your added analysis and commentary. --Jrich 01:41, 23 January 2019 (UTC)
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