Please, I'm in a bit of trouble.
I sure hope you won't rat me out. I know I haven't been around the Vita Brevis in a while, but I had to tell someone. You see, I've fallen in with a bad crowd. I've become something of a (gasp)…genealogical heretic. Recently, while working on the Connecticut ancestry of the Angel and Church families for a distant cousin I inadvertently (and yet oddly on purpose) challenged the ancestral standards of the status quo. My sin? I chose to believe an old, uncredited source document.
Above: Correspondence that comprised Church family history in Baker’s History of Montville1
I know! I know! Can you imagine the therapy I'm going to need? Sadly, however, it’s true. I have failed to comply with widely accepted proof standards.2 Oh no! The shame, the shame! I'm certain this means my application to the Society of the Cincinnati will be revoked, and indeed those august souls from Royal Bastards may have orders to draw and quarter on sight. It probably also means that I won't be able to hold high my rather specious copies of Charles Browning3 or Elizabeth Rixford.4 But you know, as Rhett Butler surely said on that stormy night in 1864, “Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.”
I confess. Mea culpa. I believed that in the absence of original documentation, it was conceivable that the accounts in a couple of those hundred-plus-year-old county histories were enough to give credence to a family line. I chose to accept that the authors just might have been telling the truth. Oh, the horror!
Galileo facing the Roman Inquisition, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
I've done other terrible things, too. I’ve read through the clues of family histories written decades ago, left by those who perhaps didn't know any more than I do but were hot on the trail for years. I've read through those suspect “derivative things” like old family letters written in the 1890s and written through the treasonous memory of people born a generation or two later, and now read by me, a generation or three further past. What’s worse, is that I've believed what they had to say! I've perused those salient publications like the Boston Evening Transcript and relished those very personal clues and queries that pointed me in any direction even when they didn't align with the centered vanity of modern-day proof standards.
And all this because I did not have an original marriage license (missing) from 1762.
Ah! The madness! Does it ever end?
Yes, with great embarrassment I also confess to believing that original documentation may contain nigh on as many errors as contained in any secondary source. I confess to not believing that just because the sources are “original” or “official” they are always superior and de facto without fault. I continue to believe that secondary sources may contain very real accounts. I confess to believing that a missing official record does not somehow imply the moral deficit of anyone's lineage or necessarily make it false or unproven. My only defense is that I am just a silly old man who believes that after doing research for nearly forty years the ability to read between the lines, is, if not a proof standard, certainly a desirable skill in researching the truth behind any family tree.
Above: New London, Connecticut Land Records, Vol. 18, p. 101, image 491, DGS8140608, Courtesy of Jason Harrison at the Family History Library
Have I gone mad? I have believed in following migration patterns like ancestral auras to guide me through a generation or two. And yes, I have believed in the causality of silly things like deeds that line up tangentially with a particular group of family names and followed those naming traditions for several further down the line. What's worse, I have refused to accept uncited facts as gospel simply because they came from some lineage society's hallowed halls. I dared to challenge any expertise whenever I could. I did so by consulting with other experts including a few of the truly kind souls from the FASG to clarify my reasoning if not my madness. I even consulted with AI to review my logic and used it to search old texts while scrolling through the myriad of sources of FamilySearch, American Ancestors, and ArchiveGrid and while further ingratiating myself with the staff at the Connecticut Museum. I dared to look at evidence in toto, and at genealogical analysis as an important part of documenting the whole story. After all, isn’t that what we were all taught to do?
Above: Montville, Connecticut Land Records - vol. 4, pp. 400-401 (8571190) Courtesy of Jason Harrison at the Family History Library
What can I say? I’ve even gone so far as to challenge the ill-defined standards of “one and the same” as being part of the problem and questioned any standard that rules like noblesse oblige. Indeed, I have committed the most heinous genealogical error in owning the concept that it's me telling my family’s story and not someone else. Like the ancestry of my cousins “the “Churches the Angels,” I have had faith that I'm not always going to be right in the proofs I gather - any more than I am always going to be the proverbial “red flag” in the telling of its story. Was I wrong?
I hope I won’t soon be writing to you from a genealogical detention camp in the unwilling 53rd state of Greenland, and that you will understand that it isn’t that I don’t promote truth and accuracy when putting together any family tree. Believe me when I tell you that I am no simpering copy and paster, or any mollycoddler of facts, and in truth I am indeed no paid spokesman for the legacies of Elizabeth Rixford or C H. Browning. Nevertheless, I urge you to consider all your sources; consult with all the experts (both for and against you) and surely consult with all the kindred souls you meet along the way as you gather your ancestral story. Do yourself a favor and consider the heresy proof standards are merely guidelines and not rigid rules. Remember too that a lack of original evidence does not imply that something is necessarily untrue. Above all, never forget —it's your story to tell.
And yes, guilty as charged.
Notes:
1. The letters of Mrs. Frederick Fargo Church to Henry A. Baker, courtesy of the Connecticut Museum
2. As per: https://bcgcertification.org/ethics-standards#genealogical-proof-standard-gps
3. Charles H. Browning, Americans of Royal Descent, (Philadelphia: Porter and Coates, 1883).
4. Elizabeth M. Rixford, Families Directly Descended From All the Royal Families in Europe (495 to 1932) and Mayflower Descendants (Rutland, VT: Tuttle Co., 1932).
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