Do you Know Your Number?

+18 votes
601 views

How many Questionable Gateway Ancestors do you have in your direct lines? If you can answer that question, you Know Your Number. 

A Questionable Gateway Ancestor is a colonial immigrant who shows royal/Magna Carta lines and doesn't appear in our research. Proving who a colonial immigrant was in Europe, before they emigrated, is a large challenge for genealogists. Right now, about 250 colonial immigrants have been identified who have well documented royal/Magna Carta lines/family trees. Genealogists have called these colonial immigrants Gateway Ancestors as they offer a Gateway to Magna Carta, Plantagenents, William the Conqueror, the Crusades, etc., etc. 

On WikiTree, there are thousands of Questionable Gateway Ancestors. We started a sub-project of Magna Carta to examine them (see this link). Over 95% of what we've researched have turned out to be bogus. 

We want your help in identifying more and in getting involved in the g2g discussions when we research them. When we showed the Leaders the Questionable Gateway Ancestors in their own trees (see here) we gave an example of how to identify them at the bottom of the page. You can do this to find ones in your own tree. Or we can have folks help you find them. When you find one, it needs to be tagged with Category:Questionable_Gateway_Ancestors. Then we can research them, removing most, and improving the quality of our tree.

Having a high number is not a reflection on your ability as a genealogist. It just means that your family tree is connected to areas with a lot of colonial immigrants, like the Puritan Great Migration project or Southern Colonies. Ideally, your number would be zero. 

Do you Know Your Number? We are challenging you to figure it out. Let us know what it is!

PS - My own has dropped from 26 to 11!

in The Tree House by PM Eyestone G2G6 Mach 3 (36.2k points)
edited by Keith Hathaway
I am very interested in finding out how many fake gateway forefathers i have. According to Wikitree, I have blood relationships with most of the Royal houses of Europe. A couple of them i already knew from my own research and consider them to be trustworthy lines (as always, unless proven otherwise...), but for the authenticity of most of my royal relationships i blindly trust Wikitree's relationship finder. I just had an eye operation and cannot yet resume intense research. And i find the example given of seeking out Gateway forefathers to be rather complicated. So i would gladly ask for help in determining my ''number''!

Regards, Albertus
Kyle - You've now found 2 of the original 3 that I spotted in my quick search. Warner-253 and Partridge-308. You are getting the hang of it!

I just looked at Partridge-308, and I would look at Partridge-314 and his wife (as it appears on WikiTree), Harcourt-105. Partridge-314 is an unsourced, orphaned profile. Richardson has Harcourt-105 married to Richard Lane-1183, with no mention of a Partridge husband. We'll take a deeper dive on this when the time comes.
Albertus - Happy to take a look through your tree and hunt for Questionables. I'll let you know what I find.
Albertus -

I found 10 Questionables in your tree with my first pass. Coggins-145, Graham-638, Hayes-388, Clark-307, Cushman-136, Massey-294, Hayden-160, Clarke-42, Peckham-4, and Hall-1618.

Wonderful work on your profiles! Have you ever tried to prove your Mayflower line?
Thank you so much, PM Eyestone! I shall look into those Questionables. I'll mark those that i manage as ''Questionable''. My deceased maternal aunt Joan Fuller tried for many years to find the link between our forefather James L. Fuller (born abt 1818 in NY) to the two Mayflower Fuller brothers, and i too have now and again searched intensely for the missing link, i.e., the parents of my gr.gr.grandfather James L. Fuller, but to no avail. I have through Wikitree been connected to a Mayflower link on my father's side, but have not yet had the time to research that line, in order to prove it. In the last seventeen years i have spent most of my energy and time researching other blood lines, of which there are so many, such as my Dutch and German ancestors, my more recent Yorkshire ancestors. My paternal surname line is Irish, but i have had to let it be, as i cannot go further back than my great-great-grandfather, as i do not know the precise county and village of origin, nor his mother's name. And so, as ill luck would have it, my two most important lines, my mother's direct paternal line Fuller and my father's direct paternal line McNamara, both end at my great-great-grandfathers, whilst i have been able to bring many other lines back several centuries and further. Thank you for the kind words regarding the work on my profiles!

PS. I am now controlling those ''Gateway Ancestors'' one by one, but have already come across one [[Massey-294|Thomas Massey]] , who is definitely authentic, and not spurious. I have ample sources proving his existance and emigration to Pennsylvania from Cheshire, England. Unfortunately, when i was creating my own profiles, i was forced to link my forefather James Massey to already pre-existing profiles of his father Thomas Massey and mother Phebe Taylor, both of which are managed by someone other than myself. Not daring to add anything to those profiles, or clean them up, i added a biographical note for THOMAS MASSEY at the profile of his son JAMES MASSEY. Do i have the right to go and clean up Thomas Massey and add sources and a biography, at his own profile, even though another manages it?  How can i have the tag of QUESTIONABLE removed from Thomas Massey? Thank you in advance, Albertus
Just jumping in really quick--a profile manager really is only meant to 'manage'. He does not 'control' or dictate what happens to the profile once it is created. Since this is all one tree that we are all contributing to, I would only assume that the profile manager would be grateful for any improvements that could be made. It's always courteous to leave a comment or shot a quick message over if the change is going to be a major one (altering parent/child relationships/a birth/death date by a significant amount). Hope that helps!
Thank you, Jayme Arrington, for your observation!
One more point -- Thomas Massey's profile manager has made very few contributions recently.  It seems that she is just doing the occasional merge, so she will probably be pleased if you pick up the ball and run with it.

But to remove the "Questionable" tag, what we have to do is to prove an entire lineage back from Massey to a Magna Carta baron.  The place to start is with his parents -- is that link in his lineage proven?  His mother looks awfully young to have been anybody's mother, but perhaps that was just faulty data entry.

I have three that I know of, four counting each of mother/son.

First the one that is not independant, Dungan. The bogus Dungan line itself has been deleted with EXTREME PREJUDICE i.e. big and bold. That leaves his mother,

1) Frances Latham. This could be real. I've looked at it closely. The link to England is, of course, very solid indeed. Then there is a bit of iffiness about a father, but the grandfather is solid. Then we have a line of shadows back through interesting people to the royal/aristocrat part. The weak link is Philip. Is the son of Philip really his son? Is this Philip the same a the real Philip of his purported father? There is purported evidence in the form of quotes of church windows "now demolished". Before Philip its solid.

2) Rebecca Holbrook. This looks bogus to me. I've never had a parentage for her before her father.

3) Clement Weaver, #2's husband. Again we have one of those "grandfather is probably or possibly  secure, intermediary could be one of two" cases. Once through that there is a long Visitation that goes back to one of those "name's the same": Bohun, which gets that miraculous connection to everybody in the nobility. Worth a good look??

The problem with finding more is that Wikitree won't let you generate a Gedcom to compare to your own, that is of any use, because it leaves out people for whom you are not manager of at least have some lesser role. So its either write a bot to walk the trees (which I have actually done for some sites) or do it by hand. I've found other fanciful connections to Britain, the worst of which I deleted on Wikitree, with no complaints, as in general the people who copied them in from Ancestry.com long since stopped playing around in Wikitree (I checked!). But those were not important gateways,

 

 

I am saddened that some of them may be incorrect but found myself finding a new "toy" to play with. LOL I am going through starting at the bottom, and working on all those not related by blood to me but in my tree. I hope I do not find more but now I just have to check.

On 2 lines, I found 5 and marked them into the link.

1 Answer

+6 votes
I both LOVE and HATE this project at the same time!  Great project here on wikiTree, great project!  Mags
by Mags Gaulden G2G6 Pilot (635k points)

Related questions

+5 votes
1 answer
+8 votes
2 answers
+13 votes
1 answer
+14 votes
1 answer
+37 votes
8 answers
+31 votes
13 answers
2.0k views asked May 11, 2015 in The Tree House by Terri Rick G2G6 Mach 4 (42.5k points)
+24 votes
18 answers
+27 votes
2 answers

WikiTree  ~  About  ~  Help Help  ~  Search Person Search  ~  Surname:

disclaimer - terms - copyright

...