Who are the parents of Richard Adams (allegedly d. 1603 in Barton St. David)?

Question

Richard Adams' profile shows imaginary parents.  Richard's alleged father, with an imaginary aristocratic wife and a false aristocratic ancestry, is a duplicate of John Adams (b. 1505) of Barton St. David, ancestor of the Adams Presidents of the United States.  The project-protected profile of John Adams of Barton St. David, correctly showing no known parents and only one known son Henry, is here: http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Adams-258

What evidence is there for Richard Adams's parents?  What evidence is there for Richard's wives?  What evidence is there for Richard's birth and death dates? 

I have repeatedly found that, for English Adams families that *might* connect to the ancestors of the American Adams Presidents, there are repeated fabrications and groundless assumptions, related to a long-disproven fraudulent royal pedigree.

Part of the problem is that there are no early parish records (baptisms, marriages and burials) for Barton St. David -- their earliest records go back to 1714.  There are some incomplete Bishop's Transcripts for Barton St. David going back to 1598.

Does anybody know of any primary source documentation at all for Richard Adams?  Is there any reason NOT to detach Richard's alleged parents?

Answer 1

Looking at the profile, it is clear that research has been done and continues to be a challenge.   There are many, many profiles on Wikitree that fall into the category of "lack" of primary sources for parents.   This profile is interesting to me because of the "potential" ancestry of the US Presidents John and John Quincy Adams.

My rule of thumb is (1) Are there sources that prove they cannot be the parents (a will where this child is not named, or land grant, etc) (2) Are these parents possible? (They were born and lived in the right place at the right time) (3) When I spend some time searching, do most people agree with these parents (I am not talking about all the unsourced trees on the usual sites, I am talking about people who write with authority or with "evidence explained" theories.)

If the above are true, I leave the parents.   Mostly because someone else will just add them back with the support of the preponderance of information.

Finally, if we removed every set of parents with no "primary" proof, we would have a lot of unconnected profiles with no idea how they "might" fit in the big picture.

I would not detach the parents.

Comments

I would like to add that Conjecture is based on Experience or Theoretical Knowledge that you already possess, and certainly leads in the correct direction Just a guess is a shot in the dark. A "wild guess" would be if Richards parents were a completely different nationality or ethnic orgin.

In Welsh Genealogies A.D. 1500-1600 Dr. Michael Siddons extends the pedigrees of Dr Peter Bartrum's Welsh Genealogies 300-1400 and 1400-1500 down to c.1600 many persons born in the early 1600's are included and adds about two hundred new family lines. You have until november to reserve your set.

 

 

Answer 2

Several name differences,Rychard,Richardus, There some listed on

Family Search.Org, in Warwickshire.also shows some marriages.

Family Search.Org is a Free site.Also several burial years.

St Martins Parish is in several places.

Answer 3

Robin, part of the problem here is the almost complete lack of records.  There is exactly one record for Richard's alleged father -- John Adams appears on a subsidy list in Barton St. David in 1539.  There was also a Robert Adams who appears on a subsidy list in Barton St. David in 1543.  Either one of them could conceivably had a son named Richard.  All the research that has ever been done on this John Adams comes from Bartlett's 1927 Adams genealogy and appears on John's original profile (which I'm hoping to merge with the duplicate): http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Adams-258

That brings us to Richard Adams -- what is known about him?  None of his alleged children have baptism records on their profiles.  In my online searches, I have not come across a single reference to a primary source document.  My working assumption is that his ancestry, like that of so many other Adams families, is a deliberate fabrication reaching toward the proven fraudulent royal ancestry that was published in NEHGR in the 1850s.

It appears from Richard's profile that there were two marriages of Richard Adams in Thornbury, Gloucestershire (1549 and 1568) and a burial record for a Richard Adams in Barton St. David in 1603.

If none of these "records" are fabrications (which is all too common with these early Adams profiles), is there any evidence that the Richard Adams who was buried in Barton St. David, Somerset was the same person as the Richard Adams who married in Thornbury, Gloucestershire?  Thornbury is not particularly close to Barton St. David.  It appears that records with the name Richard Adams are being randomly thrown together.

Robin, the WikiTree policy for uncertain parents is here: http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Uncertain

I quote: "An Uncertain name or parent may be speculative but it should not be a guess. If you're only guessing at a name or parent you should not use the data fields. Instead, explain it in the narrative. You can link to highly speculative parents in the text."

It appears that the parents of Richard Adams, according to WikiTree policy, are just a wild guess and should be removed.  What do you think?

Comments

Although a preferred answer has already been selected,  which does give reasons not to delete the parents I agree with John about the lack of records .There seems a lack of evidence to support this whole profile.

We are supposed to care about accuracy and to cite sources (that's why I joined ) It is frequently quoted that genealogy without sources is a myth.

There are no extant parish records for this parish before  1714  yet we have exact dates of burials

 There are transcripts of odd pages of the Bishops Transcripts for Wells edited by Dwelly

 For this parish  there are  only a  very few years that were able to be transcribed :1607 1608, 1615, 1617, 1638,  1679. (these transcriptions  are  also indexed  on Freereg)  There are seven Adams events  amongst them two children of John and Martha buried in 1607 and the burial of widow Agnes in 1615/16

 (NB to a comment on the profile,if there were any more known registers,  they would be in  the Archives not the church. It was in 1978 that all non current records over 100 years old   and all records  with an earliest entry 150 years old were required to be deposited  in diocesan records offices The diocesan record office for Barton St David is the Somerset Archives)

 The Thornbury registers  where the two marriages took place, are in fairly poor condition but are viewable on Ancestry.  I  could find no trace of any  Stebbings  nor  Armager.  ( the last is  a very unusual name, just 4 incidences in TNA with 3 from same family with Armiger given  as alternative ) There are several 16th cent Adams  in this register(it is a common name)

Move forward to the children apparently born to Richard in Trent . There are very good , legible PRs for Trent (which is now in Dorset)  Again, I checked  the index on Ancestry  and went through the images.  From 1560-69   there are several Addams baptisms with fathers  called John, Nicholas and William but no Richard.

 Moving to the secondary sources  cited  There is no mention on the profile of pages use or the  facts each citation backs up or mention of  the original evidence used by these authors  for this man and his family

 I checked those that I could check . All but the first two citations were available online (though really  wondered why the Visitation of London was cited)

I couldn't find  this  Richard  in any of the texts I looked at ( I used the indexes and search facilities). If f I missed something which is all too possible,then great, that  page could be cited

That leaves two secondary sources which I couldn't check, presumably these supply the evidence  because if not, what is the basis for this man's parentage ? (and I'd add wives and children)

---

Thank you so much for all this research, Helen. Do your efforts lead you to conclude that Richard's given parents should be detached (but linked to in a Disputed Origins section in the narrative)? And am I also understanding you to say that there is no evidence for Richard's children on this profile ?

---

There are a multitude of unsourced profiles of parents with no hard evidence or none at all 100's of them on Wiki. What next???????

---

What's next is researching them, adding sources where found, and correcting errors when found.

---

My point is not everyone has information out there. So in setting this precident with Richard and disconnecting his parents because of no information we would need to do them all in fairness. Yes we would be correcting them.

---

Replying to Helen: First of all, thank you for your research.  Most likely there is no basis for the wives and parents of Richard; I would be very surprised if any of the "sources" on the profile contain any information about Richard.  This list of sources was added arbitrarily (copy and paste) to several Adams profiles, apparently as an attempt to give a veneer of credibility to pure fantasy.  There is just so much fiction regarding Adams lineages.  I stumbled over this when I discovered that my own 16th-century Adams ancestor had a bogus royal ancestry. 

While researching my illusory Adams ancestry I discovered that its aristocratic component originally appeared as a fraud that deceived the editors of the New England Historical and Genealogical Register back in the 1850s.  Despite repeated disavowals in NEHGR, it repeatedly rises and has emerged onto the internet as the heart of a hallucinatory "grand unification theory" linking most if not all colonial immigrant Adams families to America.

The sinews of this concoction are occasional isolated real records of an Adams, around which get wrapped an envelope of fabrication and conjecture.  There may actually be a will of a Richard Adams out there, listing the names of some or all of the children shown on the profile.  This hypothetical will may have given Richard's residence as Barton St. David.  And there certainly was a John Adams who appears on a 1539 record in Barton St. David (about whom nothing else is known), so this John gets grafted onto Richard's family tree as his father. 

As an alternative, John's conjectural son Henry gets grafted on as Richard's father, but nobody seems to have tried the Robert Adams who appeared in 1543 in Barton St. David.  This Robert often gets arbitrarily selected as John's father, completely without evidence.  See, for example, this book which provides fictitious birth and death dates (most likely gleaned from internet family trees) for Robert and John Adams of Barton St. David: https://books.google.com.sa/books?id=etmSAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA390&lpg=PA390&dq=robert+adams+barton+st+david&source=bl&ots=1Hv0NMpp82&sig=svS6m21DjsbN9a04KSyRjECTSqo&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=robert%20adams%20barton%20st%20david&f=false

I have disconnected several lines from the grand Adams fantasy tree, but this stuff has a way of growing back.  My real interest here is to merge Richard's alleged father, John Adams-13736, with his duplicate John Adams-258.   This means detaching the fantasy parents, wife, and children (including Richard) of John Adams-13736.  And that, as this G2G discussion indicates, is easier said than done.

I am currently involved in a mediation regarding this Adams question, so I will not say anything further about this family, here or elsewhere, until that mediation has run its course.

---

Reply to Al:

In this case, *careful research* -- as described by both Helen and John -- is indicating that there is little evidence to support the links on the profile in question. This is not an example of across-the-board delinking of relations where a profile has no sources. In fact, the analysis being done here appears to reveal that the "sources" on the profile in question are bogus. So it's not at all a case that would set some precedent for "if we delink parents on this one, we have to delink them on every profile that has no sources."

That said, I personally am in the camp that one *does* have to provide evidence of a relationship before linking it. And absent such evidence, the relational links *should* be detached (but described in a "disputed origins" section of the narrative).  If that results in 100s of detached "floater" profiles, so be it. Having a single family tree should not drive the reasons we connect profiles.  Evidence should be the driver.

---

If you are attempting research back into the 1500s or earlier, you will certainly find that the modern languages spoken today are not the same as those spoken and written in these earlier times. You will also find many of the records written in some form of Latin. In England, because the first printed books did not appear until the end of the 1400s, most of the records and books before that time are comparatively rare, especially those written in the common language and not in Latin. This is true in other European countries also.

The further you research into the Middle Ages, you will find that from 900 A.D. until after 1300 A.D., Latin in various forms was the predominant and official language of the Catholic Church and was used for all forms of scholarship. Before the age of printing, introduced by Johannes Gutenberg around 1439, all books and other manuscripts were handwritten and the number of copies of any one book or record was very limited.

  I am not trying to discourage anyone from doing research back into the Middle Ages and beyond, I am just suggesting that unless you have these skills and can read these manuscripts, you are probably copying and not doing research. I fully realize that there are people who can read these manuscripts, but if you read what they say, you will quickly realize that pushing your pedigree back before about 1550 A.D. would require years of study and hard work.

 

COPIED FROM ABOVE COMMENT:

In Welsh Genealogies A.D. 1500-1600 Dr. Michael Siddons extends the pedigrees of Dr Peter Bartrum's Welsh Genealogies 300-1400 and 1400-1500 down to c.1600 many persons born in the early 1600's are included and adds about two hundred new family lines. You have until november to reserve your set.

---

It looks like Helen put in a lot of time to try to track down any sources that would indicate that John was Richard's parents. I am going to have to agree with John on this one. There is not evidence to show who Richard's parents were, and the lack of indicates more strongly that they are unknown. If it were me, I'd link to the possible parents in the biography, but would not have them attached until better sources are found. Referring to a set of books isn't helpful unless you indicate pages referenced, and in this case since few people seem to have access, also a small quote as to what you're referring to.

---

Abby, thank you for your mediation of this issue. Could you please make your response an answer that can then be marked best answer so it sits at the top of this very long thread? Otherwise it risks not being read by others who might come across this topic later. Thanks.