Family Tree investigations #1: Discovery

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.