Edward Davis d. 1690 Roxbury Suffolk

+5 votes
216 views
I’m currently working on trying to improve a Davis family line which apparently originated in England, though is unsourced. Would anyone who’s skilled in early American genealogy be able to take a look at this for me?

I’m currently struggling to find records of the family, as we are looking at it from an unsourced starting point.
WikiTree profile: Edward Davis
in Genealogy Help by David Mortimer G2G6 Mach 1 (16.9k points)
edited by Ellen Smith

The profile you linked to is not much of a starting point. Not only is it essentially unsourced (it does refer to some Ancestry.com databases, at least one of which might contain good content), but some or all of the content appears to be for a different man, Tobias Davis.

What information are you starting with? (What do you think you know? And what makes you interested in this person?)

PS - I removed the profile_improvement tag from your question because the profile you refer to is not yet in a condition to quality for profile improvement.

As Ellen states, the profile started off as a Tobias Davis married to Anne Kingman. The death in Roxbury in 1690 belongs to Tobias. [See: Vital records of Roxbury, Massachusetts Vol. 2:506].

This profile is so inconsistent that it would be difficult to work from. 

I found another profile for Edward Davis. It is https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Davis-37842 and was connected to an existing profile for his wife Hannah Gridley.

I merged the two profiles for Hannah Gridley, but I did not merge the two profiles for Edward Davis because the profile you cited contains a number of "facts" that do not appear to me to be relevant to the Edward Davis represented by that other profile.
I was working on this profile because I’m in the England project: Gloucestershire and the family line was originally accidentally attached to a glouc. Davis family. I didn’t want to just leave it.

Are we able to merge these profiles away into existing well sourced profiles?

There is a long and sometimes-sordid history of Americans finding English records for people of the right name to possibly be their immigrant ancestors, then attaching those people to their family trees. This is likely to be the situation here.

Apparently, nothing has been found in New England records regarding the Edward Davis who married Hannah Gridley (the father of Hannah Gridley was a Great Migration immigrant who was researched by the top-flight researchers in the Great Migration Project of the New England Historic Genealogical Society), so there seems to be no good reason to connect him to a Gloucestershire family.  We can "merge away" the Edward Davis profile you asked about.

Unfortunately, that leaves the England Project to deal with profiles created (sometimes several times over) on the basis of flawed (or even fraudulent) genealogies that connected American immigrants to English people (possibly including people who never existed).  I see that the other profile for Edward Davis was previously connected to https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Davis-37843 and https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Dollard-34 as parents. The connection was removed in 2017, but those alleged parents look like a big mess of erroneous genealogy. frown

1 Answer

+5 votes

Another source to add to your list.

https://archive.org/stream/davisfamiliesofe00rock/davisfamiliesofe00rock_djvu.txt  Pg 261:

It is interesting to note that Edward Davis in 1659 
had a wife, Hannah, daughter of Richard Gridley. 
Possibly Edward Davis and John Davis were brothers. 
Savage says “perhaps” they were brothers. 
by Anonymous Nagel G2G6 Mach 3 (38.5k points)

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