How can these two Daniel Blevins profiles be reconciled?

Question

I am trying to clean up some profiles of Blevins pioneers in early southwestern Virginia, most of which were created by Leslie Blevins, a former WikiTree member who wrote a book on the Blevins families.  The profiles he created are based on his book, but unfortunately some of those claims are unsourced and speculative - particularly many claims about how the Blevins living in Virginia in 1700s fit together.

My question relates to two different profiles for a Daniel Blevins (Blevins-1456 and Blevins-1965) which clearly seem to be referring to the same person in some respects but were created as separate profiles, one by Les and the other by a different (also former) WikiTree member who disputed many of the claims in his book.  In this case, they seem to have disagreed about who the children of this Daniel were, and specifically who his son Daniel Jr. was.  

In a nutshell, both profiles seem to agree that this Daniel Blevins Sr.:

1. Appears on the tax lists in the Monocosie Hundred in Maryland in 1733
2. Migrated with likely brother(s) and other related families to southwestern Virginia by the 1740s
3. Is likely the same Daniel Blevins who acquired land along Marrowbone Creek in the 1760s in what is now Pittsylvania county 
4. Was the "Daniel Blevins, Sr. of Pittsylvania County in Virginia" who signed a 1777 POA seeking to recover land in Rhode Island, along with "Daniel Blevins, son of said Daniel Blevins, Daniel Jr., in Botetourt County in Virginia" - this POA is also signed by a "Sarah" presumably the wife of one of the Daniels.

But that's where the similarity stops - the children listed in the profiles and any details about the later life of this Daniel are disputed.  The family details (including LNAB of the wife) in Blevins-1456 are from Les Blevins book & highly speculative.  Frankly, in the absence of some will, bible, court record or similar document emerging, I think any attempt to identify the children of this Daniel would be pretty speculative.

It seems like these profiles should be merged but I am not sure how to do it given these conflicts.  I have marked them as an unmerged match for now.   Any thought from the community on how to reconcile this? 

Answer 1

I think you should work on the two profiles off-line or on a free space page and strip them down. Then attempt to create the profile using only bona-fide sources. This way you can determine if there two Daniel Sr. or only the one. Then recreate the profiles with only the verifiable information. Anything else you feel is important - either speculative or information you can't quite reconcile can go at the bottom of the profile as == Research Notes ==. Hopefully this will prevent someone else from coming along and putting the unproven information as facts.

I did something like it here:

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:Philip_Ream_Conflagation

Comments

Is conflagation a newly coined word for a type of conflation that is exceptionally hard to disentangle, possibly because the records were destroyed in a massive fire (conflagration)?

I had to giggle when I saw that word...

And I know that the Blevins situation is an exceptionally problematic case.

---

Here's another example:

http://freepages.rootsweb.com/~jillaine/genealogy/taylor/index.html

(side note: this page attracted the editors of NEHGS and a result for me was a two-part article in the Register.

Answer 2

There was a huge dispute between Les and Robert, another Blevans/Blevins researcher who died in 2020 about how to distinguish between the Daniels. Robert left a book behind that I have not been able to find in any library west of the Rockies. I found the explanation that there were two convincing. I believe that Les thought there was only one. There are certainly at least two (father and son) and possibly a third related, but not directly... The old rootsweb discussions from before 2010 (some quite heated) may still be out there, but as I recall it was all a bit of a hot mess. The further availability of sources on line (road crews in particular) in conjunction w/DNA might help.