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Archiver > WHITNEY > 1997-09 > 0873236510


From: <>
Subject: Re: Whitney12.ged
Date: Tue, 2 Sep 1997 17:41:50 -0400 (EDT)


Dear Rob:

I guess the author is a whole bunch of us. Many of us have sent Jon gedcoms
or attachments with descendency charts, FGR forms, etc over the past two
years. He accepts responsibility only for accumulation - not sources or
accuracy. I have submitted a fair amount, and the gedcoms that I have sent
recently have notes and sources. However, previously, even though my notes
included a lot of material on my sources, the earlier version of PAF that I
was using did not transfer notes, etc. well in a gedcom, so some of that
didn't make it through.

I am distressed that it still contains some errors that are obvious (most of
them derived from misinformation in Ancestral File) - such as the one that
says Elinor, wife of John-1 was born at St. Margaret, Warwick. There is no
St. Margaret Warwick, in fact, none in the entirety of Warwickshire (source:
The Phillimore Atlas and Index of Parish Registers edited by Cecil Humphery
-Smith, 1984 ed). The St. Margaret is too coincidental not to have come from
the place of her husband's baptism, but I have no clue where the Warwick came
from. I searched all the available transcribed parish registers (for
Warwickshire) at the Society of Genealogists Library in London last year,
looking for a marriage of an Elinor anyone to a John Whitney, with no luck.
I also searched all of England in the Marriage Indices for the same thing.
Another one that still is there (I think) is assigning the birth of one of
John's children to "Hesworth" - another error from AF.

The problem is, with so many different people contributing, Jon (rightly)
feels that he cannot alter anyone's submission. There was a time about 15
months ago, when this process of accumulation was just getting started that
we found that there were four (very slightly) different versions of a family
sequence. John went to the trouble of typing out all the differences for
each generation, identifying from whom each version came, and asked us for
suggestions as to how to resolve the differences. I was the only one who
answered with citations of my sources and my basis for establishing the
material I had submitted. Jon was not willing, and I can surely understand -
the extreme courtesy and kindness with which our people treat each other is
one of the real strengths of this group - why he was not, to then arbitrarily
decide that I was the only one that was "right". It might have meant the end
of our "just-getting-started" association. This, BTW, was long before we
became a Maillist at Maiser, we were just sharing stuff back and forth with
an individually maintained address list of a dozen or so people.

This problem does make Jon's life very difficult when it comes to match/merge
of the information from each newly supplied gedcom.

If you have any suggestions, I for one would be very happy to hear them. We
do have a few very careful people like Robert Ward who are very scrupulous in
providing their citations, and many of the rest of us are getting better and
better (as you might guess if you followed the recent discussion of the
parentage of the Samuel Whitney of Stratford, CT who married Ann(e)
Laboree/Laborie). Sources were bandied back and forth and cited at great
length, and it was probably Robert's transcription of the will of Samuel's
father, Nathaniel Whitney of Weston, MA, that "clinched" the argument, and A.
Whitney Brown finally concluded that the data that he had gotten from the
Phoenix book on the CT Whitneys was in error.

This is probably more than you wanted to know, but you did ask about sources.

Allan

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