Adding a son for Pieter Kool

Question

On 21 Apr 2022 Paula Rogers wrote on Kool-256:

I am proposing the addition of Pieter Kool (Cool-726) as son of the above Pieter Kool and Alida Dingman.

Comments

I think you meant to refer to Cool-726. These spellings will get us every time!

The Cool-726 profile says his parents were Pieter Kool and Alida Dingman. Are both of them named in the baptism record? How are the names spelled? (In the New Netherland project, we've been copying the complete texts of records into profiles, including the names as they appear in the record and the names of witnesses, as these can be important clues for genealogy.)

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Thanks, Ellen.  I did mean Cool.  On the baptism certificate names are spelled as follows:  Pieter, (son of) Pieter Cole, Alida Dingman (with “en” inserted between the g and the m); (sponsors) Andries Gerdener and wife Jannetje Cole

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Thanks for that information, Paula. You did nice work in researching Pieter and his family. They are connected now.

You will see that I started adding a "Church Records" section on the profile for the younger Pieter Cole/Cool, and that I changed his LNAB to Cole because that is the name on his baptism record. You may find it peculiar (or perhaps a weird fetish) that we (1) record the precise details of the baptism and marriage records and (2) insist on assigning the LNAB on the basis of the earliest record that meets certain criteria, even when the name is inconsistent with other family names. Goodness knows, when I first encountered these practices, I thought they were odd and unnecessary. However, I learned that they have a lot of value. For example, the records lists make it much easier to detect the family patterns (in names and baptism witnessing) that can confirm (or disprove) our theories of family connections, and insistence on using the names found in the contemporary records has actually helped us find a few situations where people had been assigned to the wrong family because an earlier researcher had treated two similar-appearing names as the same name.

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I just pulled out my grandmother's Cool book - it lists the children  of Peter and Alida Dingman. It also continues their son Pieter (married Tabitha Rohrbach) line. 

I'll work on adding them to the appropriate profiles; there is about 13 children born to each Pieter/Peter. 

I'm not going to try to start this tonight though, I want to make sure I'm looking at the correct Pieter/Peter's with a fresh and rested brain .

Maybe in a list form? 

Carol

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Please tread with extreme caution, Carol. Many of us inherited old genealogy books, and also family trees assembled by our ancestors from sources unknown, and many of those inherited "sources" became the basis for the online family trees and Gedcoms that are so frequently disparaged by WikiTreers here in G2G. The Cool family name is one that has been problematic in this regard. WikiTreers have put years of effort into trying to correct errors in member-contributed profiles for various families named Kool, Cool, van der Cuyl, and Cole, and to sort out the individual members of these families (we have wrestled with duplicate profiles and also with situations where two people of the same name were conflated). Evidence of some of this effort can be seen on pages like https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Jacobsen-1018 and https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Barentszen-1 (see the profile comments on those pages) and Details of records for some people named Kool or Cool. ADDED: Also consider https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Arentsz-3 and https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/157990/revisting-jacob-barentszen-cool-kool-van-de-cuyl

That kind of experience has taught us the importance of basing our genealogies on primary sources and being meticulous in our use of evidence. (I cringe a bit when I see statements like "Sponsors at the christening were Peter's sister, Jannetje Cool and her second husband, Symon Haas," because I know that the baptism record didn't identify Jannetje as Pieter's sister. How did we determine that she was his sister and not an aunt of the same name? Bad assumptions about relationships can lead to bad family trees.)

Please evaluate your Cool genealogy book against the criteria described at New Netherland Settlers Project Reliable Sources. That page is part of the "pre-1700" reliable sources collection, but it is equally applicable to the 1700s. It would be great to discover that your book has a solid basis, but let's look before we leap!

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Thanks, Ellen.  I do like the way that you handle the transcribing the source documents into the bio.  I have struggled with this-- is it Rorhbach or Roorbach, Pieter or Peter-- and this makes sense to me to have the name at the time of record noted in the bio.

I also agree with what you said about mug books and genealogy (I have spent 15 years trying to "erase" the incorrect surname for my 3rd great-grandmother) but I do see the value of them as "hints" to pursue further research.

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Indeed, those old genealogies have great value. They got many of us interested in our ancestry, and much of the time their information is good. It's unfortunate that they also have the potential to send people down the wrong paths.

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Thank you everyone for the input and why I was inquiring on the best (and appropriate) way to handle this.

I wasn't thinking of creating new profiles - research and confirmation would need to be done . It's the Kool/Cool/Cole etc  tree, its complicated enough on my small branch of it without complicating it on WT; it becomes more complicated with a Hess marriage.

Maybe the best way to share the info is to do a "new comment" on the profiles instead of using "Research Notes" in the profile? 

Thanks again. Ellen, I'll be sure to look at those links 

Carol