18thVirginia
Major
- Joined
- Sep 8, 2012
If you google Ancestry DNA coupon, there are several available today that will discount the DNA price by $20 and give you free shipping. But I think the $20 off ends today.
Thank you, 18th.If you google Ancestry DNA coupon, there are several available today that will discount the DNA price by $20 and give you free shipping. But I think the $20 off ends today.
...3. Findagrave is a community created source. It's not evidence of anything. In this case I know that the information on findagrave is incorrect because I have the correct man's pension with his full date of birth and date of death matching the information on the headstone. He has a completely different full name, wife and children from the ones attributed to the man buried in his grave according to findagrave. The man listed on findagrave has the same initials and was born nearby in the same year; everything else is different.
I have one of those "ghost people." Benjamin R Walker was a member of CSO Rice's company, has a military record, and is mentioned by name in his memoir, yet he only exists in one census, the 1850. He was a lawyer in Lauderdale county and apparently lived for some time after the war as his name appears in multiple court cases - still, no census records.I did a lot of work on findagrave and participated in two of their forums for a short while (what a mess those were; gone now). Yes, it's full of junk so one has to be very careful. Participating in their "Help" forum revealed what a host of bizarre persons and practices bedevil the site. That said, it's also a gold mine. You just have to correlate and make sure. If you're lucky the stones speak volumes and provide definite proof. Like everything in genealogy you've got to have multiple sources.
I've recently found three of what I'm calling 'ghost' people: ones who only show up in maybe one or at best two records and that's it. Nothing before and nothing after can be found for them no matter how clever the searches even though there's a definite connection to people with detailed trails. And I'm talking about people in the twentieth century.
I've found two cases of women whose death records show that there was a husband named Joe X (and whose birth families are documented) but nothing can be found for Joe before or after or for them together. In one case there is a city directory listing for Joe and wife in the city where Mrs. X died but nothing else for Joe anywhere. I also found a case where a girl shows up on one census only with her mother, both of them living with the girl's grandmother. The girl also shows up in high school in the right town (not a big city) in the same year as the census (and she is high school age in the census record). Neither she or her mother show up anywhere before or after. Grandma, however, has a very detailed paper trail although the one son who would seem to be the husband/father is single in the census preceding the girl's birth year and married to someone else in the census after the girl's birth year. I've not encountered such dead ends before. Very strange indeed.
I feel like I missed something; are you related to the Footes? Horton Foote was a cousin of Shelby, so anyone related to one is related to both.Holy Cow. Those Hortons.....Horton Foote.........OMG. I'm admittedly slow and sometimes it takes me a while. Guess we'll be looking at Horton Foote plays again.
Yeah, there's a teeny-tiny link, but it was plain as day once it hit me in the face. And I didn't find it on Ancestry, either.
I feel like I missed something; are you related to the Footes? Horton Foote was a cousin of Shelby, so anyone related to one is related to both.
Well, the county history is at least a secondary source. Someone presumably told that information to whoever wrote the county history. It's not good evidence but it is evidence. Evidence is not proof.I've been away from the computer and sorry I can't read through all the posts in this thread but heres my two cents:
This goes back before ancestry, to pedigrees and group sheets in libraries, to county histories, etc. The problem is that many folks don't know what "evidence" means. My favorite is the one where the family ancestor stole away from the family castle in the early 1700s, crossed the Channel to France, served in the French Army, was kidnapped by pirates, and dropped off in Florida. He then makes his way to the mountains of Kentucky. When I asked what evidence there was for this story the guy said "It says so in the county history."
Many folks on ancestry are hobbyists with full lives outside family history and they don't have any reason to take a class or read a book on evidence or on what proof and what is not. They mean well. But to them if they get a "leaf" going back to the Middle Ages that is as good in the way of evidence as a primary document.
One of the best books I have read on evidence and its meaning is David Hackett Fisher's "Historians Fallacies." Get ready for a dull, thick, plodding analysis of how historians make mistakes. But informative. On outright genealogical fraud look up Gustav Anjou. There is an article "Gustav, We Hardly Knew You" that should be available on line.
Al
It's probably the pedigree leading back from ... I think Alfred the Great? who commissioned it for himself. It's completely fictional of course but it's very old fiction! I can hit the same pedigree myself, I added it to my tree just for fun.I use familysearch.org as well as Ancestory.com. Familysearch is free, and run by the Mormans. It is decent, but man people run wild. I was excited to see one of my distant cousins had traced us back to the Harrison Family of Virginia. There are 2 US Presidents in that line. Then I started following it back and got to the 1600s, then the 1400s, then Robert the Bruce...., the Attila the Hun, then BC.... Greek names showed up... then some names like Methusala and Bathsheba. Finally it ended at Adam & Eve. I swear...
I facetiously pretended to believe every word of it, while my wife was totally beside herself in disbelief. I bragged about my "Pedigree" for months. I'll try to find it and post it. It's great.
Evidence is not proof
It's not good evidence but it is evidence
You can't have proof without evidence. But you can have evidence insufficient to constitute proof. That's why you get phrases like "the preponderance of the evidence," because in most cases, several pieces of evidence which corroborate each other are required to prove something. Proof is elusive, it is rarely something you find once and then you're done. It's an ongoing process. Something you thought was "proven" by many pieces of corroborating evidence today can turn out to have additional evidence against it.Interesting take - can you think of a case of proof in the absence of evidence?
I think this is interesting too! Am I using the word "evidence" out of context? I was defining evidence as something that is probative of some premise. The county history is evidence that someone told the author a story, but is probative of nothing regarding the European ancestor.
What word am I looking for here?
That's why you get phrases like "the preponderance of the evidence,"
I got back my mom's DNA results.
Speaking of evidence, I got back my mom's DNA results. So far most of the matches prove that she was indeed related to her mother, which is not exactly news. But I also have matches showing that we do seem to be descended from John Fairfax Bolling, who was descended from Pocahontas. There was a lot of discussion about how "our" Bollings weren't necessarily "those" Bollings, but I left it on my tree because frankly it's more fun being descended from Pocahontas than not. I'm honestly surprised to have pretty reasonable proof that we are.
I agree that inventing a daughter seems like a stretch - more or less so depending on the date, because in records pre 1840, women's names can be hard to find in records. Wouldn't the DNA have hooked up with Mrs. Thomas, though? Assuming she had descendants that had been tested?I don't understand DNA much at all but have a question - what does a negative result really prove? Of course it proves that someone is not related genetically linked to someone, but is it grounds for a change complete in identity for a formerly-supposed son? I'm thinking of an "Ancient Planter" in Virginia in the 1630s who had a child Francis or Frances. There is a male Francis nearby in the next generation. They took the male Francis off the tree because the DNA did not match, which I understand. But they didn't assign him to anyone else of that surname. Then they took the orphan's court record identifying "Francis, orphan of Thomas" and said that they "must have" meant "Frances, orphan (daughter) of Thomas." They fail to account for why a male Francis lives right there among the others (on the Delmarva Peninsula no less). I think Mrs. Thomas probably had an evening with the neighbor guy and came up with the male Francis, and that the assignment of the orphan's court record to some never-before-thought-of female is a stretch. I think the male Francis was thought to be the orphan of Thomas until our modern science exposed Mrs. Thomas' secret? "Preponderance of evidence" here.