Advice before merging these pre-1700 Cox profiles? [closed]

Question

Cox-11082 is a duplicate of Cox-574 (side-by-side comparison) so they should be merged.

Should I contact one of the pre-1700 projects or know about any style guidelines before proceeding?

Or perhaps someone with more WikiTree experience would like to complete the merge? Let me know if you do. Thanks!

Answer 1

They need more sourcing. I have found some Deleware records for Cox-574. The other I could not find anything for. They have different death dates and locations but no sources.

They probably are the same person. Carolina was not divided into North and South until 1729. Craven County ran the entire state line in both South & North Carolina. In 1769 Craven County, already much smaller was eliminated in South Carolina. A lot of people add the current county not knowing the history.

Cox-574 death location is incorrect too because South Carolina did not have a Craven County in 1784. If you search for the death record I would just look in South Carolina without the county. There is no way to know now which county or area they were referring to the whole northern 1/3 of SC was Craven County at one time.

South Carolina did not have the best record-keeping habits back then. They also have not been as free with their online records. You may have to do some google searching to find more information.

Unless you want to do the research then you should leave them and let someone else do it. They need to be sourced before they are merged. All one has are some links to an ancestry tree and all the links are broke. The other only has Gedcom tags, which tell you nothing. Those @1234@ are from a Gedcom upload and tell you nothing about the source that was used.

Comments

Thank you very much Laura DeSpain.  I really would be out of my depth in looking for those records.

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Your welcome.

Answer 2

They are obviously intended to be the same person, as the one without any parents or spouse attached mentions the names of the parents in the biography.

The merge was approved on both ends, so I was able to complete it.  The alternate death date and location were added as a note in the biography.

Comments

Thank you. I believed they were probably meant to be the same person. I could not find enough sources to prove it though. Then the whole thing with them having different states and one the County did not exist at the time and Johnston County existed but it had been a part of Craven County, NC. Probably, why the death locations are different.

I was told if there were no reliable sources on the profile then they needed to be sourced before they were merged. So, as long as it is obvious we do not have to worry about it?