Stephen Gates - Parents?

Question

Apparently 19th century research gave the parents of Stephen Gates as Thomas Gates and Elizabeth, and this has been repeated and perpetuated ever since.  Recent research, pubished in the NEHGS Register in 2006, points to Stephen's parents as being Eustace Gates and Rose Wright.  Here is a link to a discussion of that research: [http://genforum.genealogy.com/gates/messages/3510.html].  (I can't link to the register.)

How do we want to handle the problem of "previous" parents and "current" parents as we merge the several Stephen Gates profiles?  I am sure that new WikiTree will continue to upload trees with Thomas as the father.

Answer 1

Vic, what you wrote above is exactly what you should write on the profile page of Stephen Gates. Then detach the incorrect parents and attach the correct ones.

Ideally, you'd include a full, complete citation to the 2006 NEGHS Register article, and even the key quote or a brief summary of the main argument that proves the parents.

If you want to see an example of how I did this, see http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Taylor-287 which is a very smiliar situation to what you describe. Actually, this page does it better:

http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Taylor-1050

Comments

This brings up an interesting problem.  Once a disputed parentage is identified and the non-parents are divorced from the children, with a good note in the Biography, how do you keep people who upload new stuff from adding the same wrong parents?

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Very good question. Ideally, the upload process would recognize the existence of an existing profile page, and ask you to merge with it. AND, ideally, the uploader would read the existing profile page and correct the problem. (that last is probably too much to expect)

But yes, this does lead to a larger question: how do we prevent duplicates from happening through subsequent gedcom uploads?

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I see that this was never done; I've updated his profile narrative (inspired by a recent g2g question about his wife), and will correct the parents.

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Thanks Jillaine. I got sidetracked and never got back to it.