Situation: family with roots across England, Wales, Scotland, New England.
Known information: family records, printed genealogies, family
tree maintained in RootsMagic and generated mostly via Ancestry in 2019-2021.
Objectives: extend
currently available information, validate family records, try to identify tools
and methods that are of general usefulness, focus on data quality.
Initial question as ‘pipe clean’: identify given name of Tinkham 5 greats
grandfather: (self) > (my mother) > Cleaveland > Aldrich > Darling
> Mercy Adaline Greene > Sarah Ann Tinkham, b.1799 > ??? Tinkham (m.
Sarah Eddy) (all this information from family records).
High level findings:
I would say the above lineage was backed up by
online records to a just about adequate extent, although with a high reliance
on secondary sources.
The main published Eddy genealogy is the key
secondary source, though it admits to its own doubts about the relevant
Tinkham/Eddy marriage. Adin Ballou’s History of Milford, Massachusetts contains
useful and interesting information about Mercy’s assumed sisters Harriet Newell
Greene and Abbie Greene Comstock. But neither of these provides a given name
for Sarah Ann’s father, nor any evidence (beyond Harriet and Abbie having had a
sister now deceased) that Mercy was in fact Sarah Ann's daughter.
The Tinkham Biographical Index does not cast
any light; indeed it potentially confuses the issue in relation to Sarah Ann’s
brother Welcome Eddy Tinkham, stating a possible paternity which (when combined
with census data) contradicts the Eddy genealogy; this alleged paternity was
subsequently picked up and published elsewhere as fact.
The FamilySearch Family Tree is questionable in
many relevant cases: persons/dates, linkages, sourcing.
I am still investigating census records. The
1790-1840 US censuses are indexed by Head of Family only, and no attempt
appears to have been made anywhere to digitise the relevant table information
(numbers of household members by sex and age) for easy cross-checking purposes.
The only printed information that is available at the right level appears to be
for the 1790 census.
The required given name was identified in the
FamilySearch Family Tree (and elsewhere on the internet) as Enoch. The ‘source’
for this appears to be 2 entries in the International Genealogical Index
‘contributed’ section, both of which are pretty dodgy in other ways; relevant
primary source images may exist (the relevant microfilm appears to have been
digitised) but I have not yet been able to view them (working on that). The 2
Enoch Tinkhams of whom there is any online record at all (in both cases well
sourced) were born far too late. I have removed the Enoch given name from the
relevant FS Family Tree entry.
Sarah Ann Tinkham appears to have no primary
sources available online under her maiden name except for one relating to her
daughter Harriet’s death. The vital records of Mendon, Mass. do show Sarah
Ann's death under, obviously, her married name (backed up by her
parents-in-law, and probably her husband, having been buried in the same
cemetery). (These vital records also show Mercy's marriage, which I suppose
provides a circumstantial link between Sarah Ann and Mercy.)
Making things worse, Sarah Eddy has no primary
sources available online, and her brother Thomas Jenckes Eddy has very limited
ones, except in both cases for their father Thomas’ will; her older siblings,
meanwhile, have plenty of primary sources beyond Thomas’ will.
The fact that many of the key events appear to have
taken place in New York State, where record keeping was minimal at the relevant
time, is probably not helping at all.
Thomas Jenckes Eddy can be traced via a town
history and the 1810 census to Kinderhook, Columbia County, NY, where his
father died that year (evidence in Providence Gazette and in probate records).
Local militia records (backed up by the same town history) show Thomas Jenckes
Eddy as an Ensign, and that he died in 1812.
FamilySearch also had two of the Eddy Genealogy's
Thomases conflated into one, despite the Eddy Genealogy and Providence Gazette
providing clear evidence to the contrary; I am working on correcting this.
Data Quality:
Many of the published secondary sources clearly
take enormous care, although primary sources are not usually cited.
FamilySearch is very clear about the level of data
quality of the different types of information it makes available.
Many researchers appear to take ‘contributed’
sources as gospel. In many cases information is posted to the web without any
sources at all. You can track erroneous facts as they make their way wider and
wider.
There appears to be very little curation of
collaborative data stores, and the whole focus feels like it’s on quantity
rather than quality. I was expecting the FamilySearch Family Tree to work like
Wikipedia with strong moderation and source checking, but very clearly not.
Services used:
American Ancestors (3 month subscription): useful
for access to the Mayflower Descendant periodical, Rhode Island Cemeteries, and
some ‘Vital Records’ type secondary sources that don’t appear elsewhere.
Brief flirtations with Ancestry, MyHeritage, and
FindMyPast, none of whose UIs gave me anything like the functionality of
FamilySearch, and all of which would have cost money to take forward, though
FMP has the ability to ‘pay as you go’ for some records. (Disclaimer: I was
heavily involved, pre sales and as solution architect, with FMP when it first
launched in 2003 as 1837online.)
FamilySearch: extensive use of Family Tree,
Records, Catalog, Books. Some searching of Genealogies (especially
‘contributed’ IGI entries as mentioned above). Considerable trawling of Images.
Other (for secondary sources): various digital
libraries, e.g. US Census publications, HathiTrust, archive.org; Google.
Some fundamental problems with FamilySearch online
search:
It doesn’t let you query the indexes properly. Some
really basic things I couldn’t do: omit rather than select; sort the results in
specific ways; use ‘or’ rather than ‘and’.
Obviously, incorrect or incomplete indexing makes
information hard or impossible to retrieve.
FamilySearch allows Export of Records search
results, but only 100 at a time, and not beyond 5,000. These exports do not
show whether or not this Record is aligned with the Family Tree as a source (this
key piece of information is shown on the Records search UI).
FamilySearch does provide very useful APIs (some
documented more clearly than others), a lot of which are available to the
general public (covered in post #3: How I use the FamilySearch APIs), though
these, like the UI, don’t allow you to retrieve search results (whether Records
or Family Tree) beyond 5,000.
The APIs allow automated Records export. (I have
found that a little simple screen scraping is required for the latter, but for
record counting purposes only.) Matching of Records against Family Tree Person
or Relationship Sources is possible via the Source Citation.
What I did next:
Having decided that it was unlikely that an Enoch
Tinkham existed with the right dates, clearly the next stage was to see which
of the other Tinkhams of which records exist could at the right time
potentially have married Sarah Eddy and/or fathered Lydia (1797), Sarah Ann
(1799), Jeremiah (1800), and Welcome (1805); I could potentially then use
census data to narrow things down further.
So I needed to drill into the data (to be covered
in blog post #2: ‘FamilySearch: Family Tree and associated data stores’).
I have still not actually found anything that can
help me answer the original pipe clean question, though.
