Family Tree investigations #1: Discovery
Situation:
·
Family
with roots across England, New England, Wales, Scotland.
Known information:
·
Family
records, printed genealogies, family tree maintained in RootsMagic (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 > Maria Adelaide Darling > Mercy Adeline Greene
> Sarah Ann Tinkham, b.1799 > Sarah Eddy m. ??? Tinkham (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; I am also reasonably confident that I
have identified my Tinkham 5 greats grandfather as Phil[l]ip Tinkham/Tinkom,
b.1765.
· The FamilySearch Family Tree is
questionable in many relevant cases: persons/dates, linkages, sourcing.
· The main published Eddy
genealogy is the key secondary source, though it admits to its own doubts about
this Tinkham/Eddy marriage, and doesn’t know the husband’s first name.
· The fact that some of the key
events appear to have taken place in New York State, where record keeping was
minimal at the relevant time, doesn’t help at all.
· The George Aldrich Genealogy
lists Maria Adelaide’s Darling grandmother as her mother, which is not
helpful, but there are primary sources for the correct relationship.
· Adin Ballou’s History of
Milford, Massachusetts contains useful and interesting information
about Mercy’s assumed sisters Harriet Newell Greene and Abbie Greene
Comstock.
· I can find no evidence (beyond family
records and a stand-alone International Genealogical Index entry, both unsourced, plus Harriet
and Abbie’s having had two sisters now deceased according to Adin Ballou) that
Mercy was in fact Sarah Ann Tinkham's daughter.
· Sarah Ann 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).
· 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; their older siblings, meanwhile, have plenty of
primary sources beyond Thomas’ will.
· FamilySearch had Sarah Eddy’s
father Thomas and another Thomas Eddy conflated into one, despite the Eddy
Genealogy and Providence Gazette providing clear evidence to the contrary; I
have corrected this.
· 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.
· Sarah Ann’s father’s given name
was identified in the FamilySearch Family Tree as Enoch. The ‘source’ for this
appears to be 2 entries in the International Genealogical Index ‘contributed’
section. I have obtained a copy of the FamilySearch source sheet for these IGI
entries; it does not in any way verify a given name of Enoch. The 2 US Enoch
Tinkhams of whom there is any real evidence at all (in both cases well sourced)
were born far too late.
· Family records say that the Tinkham
who married Sarah Eddy fits into the main New England immigrant family of Tinkhams
(specifically descending from an Ephraim Tinkham whose father-in-law Peter
Brown was on the Mayflower). While there are definitely errors elsewhere in
these family records, I concluded it was probably unnecessary to chase up the
other possible Tinkham families in the US or in England.
· The 1790-1840 US censuses are
indexed by Head of Family only, and no attempt appears to have been made by
FamilySearch to digitise the relevant table information (numbers of household
members by sex and age) for easy cross-checking purposes.
· The Tinkham Biographical
Index provided the key clue by indicating a potential father (a specific Philip
Tinkham) for Sarah Ann’s brother Welcome Eddy Tinkham. Combined with what there
is of 1800 census data, this appears to me to be a good enough match. I have therefore
merged Enoch into this Philip on FS Family Tree.
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).
Notes on APIs:
· FamilySearch provides some very
useful APIs (some documented more clearly than others). These are covered in
post #3: How I use the FamilySearch APIs.
· Like the UI, the APIs don’t
allow you to retrieve any result lists beyond 5,000.
· I have found that a little
simple screen scraping is required, though for counting results only.
