Richardson's works ("Plantagenet Ancestry..." and the rest) considered THE MASTER sources?

Question

In exploring early Ancestors of Gateway Ancestors found (what looks like) errors in genealogy (here on wikitree). All of this according to both "Plantagenet Ancestry: A Study in Colonial and Medieval Families" and "Magna Carta Ancestry: A Study in Colonial and Medieval Families".

Thoughts and comments?

Comments

I've got her down as Philippa _____.  What's the evidence that she was a Bonville?

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We find in the book "the History of the Granville family" written by Roger Granville, the following statement concerning Philippa's surname.   

Granville, Hist. of the Granville Fam. (1895): pp. 56–57 (“The arms of William Graynefeld, impaled with those of his second wife [Philippe Bonville], were in Kilkhampton Church, in a hatchment of stucco.”).  

I think it is fairly certain that Philippa was a Bonville.  For, how, otherwise do we account for the above statement by Roger Granville.  The Yeo society did considerable research into this stained glass window, which had the Grenville arms impaling the Bonville arms, representing the marriage of William Grenville, Esq. and Philippa Bonville.  Their research can be found here http://www.yeosociety.com/heraldry/yeo%20evidence.htm.

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There are lots of unexplained arms in churches.  Unrecorded younger son marries unrecorded daughter.  No first names, no dates, all you've got is, a Grenville married a Bonville.

"The History of the Blah Family" by Blah is usually not good news.  It's a mistake to assume that anybody with the same surname has inside information.  Usually those books are just ordinary amateur research with a tendency to favourable interpretation.

I think Richardson is reaching for excuses not to drop the line altogether.

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The identification of Philippa being a Bonville was made well before "The History of the Blah Family" by Blah, if you care to know.  Just take a quick peek at the references and you'll realize this.  

Good day.

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And only yesterday I was reading about the man who married a Countess, and his son who married a Plantagenet descendant, and his grandson who married an Earl's daughter.  The "sources" are full of these.  The said Earl's widow married a pleb as well.  It's in all the books.

Filtering out the junk is what it's mostly about now.

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Secondary sources are only as credible as their authors and the evidence they use.  It's up to Wikitree members to determine which sources they trust  for that particular Wikitree profile they are researching.

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Hi y'all! This discussion prompted me to look up a G2G discussion I often go back to: https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/25911/important-understand-distinction-original-derivative-sources

A couple other discussions I ran across in my list of favorites while looking for that one that I thought I'd share:

• https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/344064/whats-a-good-source
• https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/230910/criteria-for-evaluating-sources

Cheers, Liz

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Joe, do you know what happened to your write-up on the Philippa issue you refer to on your post of Nov 28 2016? It now links to a different post, it seems.

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Her profile became the issue of a very tiresome edit war.  I need to return to this problem and correct it.

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

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Thank you, I just wanted to know what you were referring to.

Answer 1

Please list some examples of what you mean. 

 The works of Richardson & Cawley ,in addition to other sourcing materials are carefully considered before connecting or disconnecting profiles. Please see the project pages for the Euroaristo & Magna Carta Projects.

With the Magna Carta Project there is a carefully considered review process in place regarding profiles that lead to the Surety Barons.

• Our primary collaboration space is our Base Camp, where you can see what's being worked on now, and opportunities to help out.

Goals

• To have a reviewed/approved trail from every Gateway Ancestor to a Magna Carta Surety Baron.
  • Gateway Ancestors are those immigrants to America, prior to 1700, who are descended from a Magna Carta Surety Baron and are documented by Douglas Richardson (see "Project Sources" below). A Questionable Gateway Ancestor is not documented by Richardson, but may meet the other criteria.
• To have a reviewed/approved trail from all 17 Magna Carta Surety Barons with descendants who immigrated to America.
  • See the Descendant pages (click the links provided in the Index of Surety Barons to Gateway Ancestors).

Answer 2

By Douglas Richardson I assume you mean…

Richardson, Douglas. Royal Ancestry: A Study in Colonial and Medieval Families, in 5 vols. (Salt Lake City, Utah, 2013).

Richardson, Douglas, Plantagenet Ancestry: A Study in Colonial and Medieval Families, exp. 2nd edn. in 3 vols. (Salt Lake City, Utah, 2011).

Richardson, Douglas. Magna Carta Ancestry: A Study in Colonial and Medieval Families, exp. 2nd ed. in 4 vols, (Salt Lake City, Utah, 2011).

Yes, Richardson’s works are generally the most accurate and complete works of their kind.  They are the basis of the euroaristo project, and are generally accepted as the works to follow unless it can be positively shown to be wrong (they are after all still secondary sources).  I note that you are working from Plantagenet Ancestry and Magna Carta Ancestry.  First, there are multiple editions of these works - it is important to realize that there were occasional changes from the 2004 editions to the 2011 editions.  Second, both works were superseded by his Royal Ancestry publications which greatly expanded Richardson’s work.

With regard to gateway ancestors, these generally fall under the PGM project and the “master source” here is actually the NEHGS’s Great Migration Project.  These biographies are actually more comprehensive and more completely researched than in Richardson’s books.  The biographies are all available AmericanAncestor.org if you are a member of the NEHGS.

I am not here to slow you down.  I’m glad to have someone else helping to clean the junk out of WikiTree.  Just remember to be respectful to Profile Managers who may not like you breaking their precious royal ancestry, and to fully source and document what are fundamental changes to a profile and the person’s ancestry. 

Comments

Yes, ancestries supported by only by family trees.

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I was working from the 2011 version of Plantagenet Ancestry: A Study in Colonial and Medieval Families. But thanks for the instruction.

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Following your advice, I used a gentle hand and wrote the profile manager I was "unsure" about the data in the profile. I briefly detailed the areas and linked to my sources--Richardson's texts.

This profile, is the parent of the ones I have previously mentioned and appears (to me) to have errors.

About "ancestor crush", I am directly descended from this line. However, upon inspection am finding many errors and also at least one very weak link in this line. I could be breaking my own connection to royals.

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Gateway ancestors do not "generally fall under the PGM project".

PGM is a very "provincial" project only relating to "the Johnny come lately" folks in New England, who followed those in Virginia. Gateway ancestors
pop up everywhere. But those in Richardson don't pop up after 1700, because of his arbitrary limit.

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You are of course right.  The term Gateway Ancestor most generally refers to an ancestor which opens up one’s ancestry from one specific group to another distinct specific group.  However, the term is most commonly used here on WikiTree and elsewhere to refer to the ancestor which transitions one’s ancestry in America to one’s ancestry in Europe.  And most specifically, it refers to the ancestor who immigrated from England to the New World during the Great Migration of the 1620s to 1640s.

Certainly, Australians can similarly use the term to refer to their immigrant ancestor, and the same can be said for those in South Africa with English ancestry.  Probably many immigrant groups could use the term.  However, the most common use and meaning refers to a Great Migration immigrant with traceable European ancestry, and these all do fall under the PGM project.

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In other words, you are saying that the PGM project covers migration
to Virginia?

 

I have NEVER EVER heard of "gateway ancestor" NOT applying to any immigrant to what became the USA or Canada in the period 1607-1699, who had living descendants in the US or Canada. Are you saying that
you do not accept William Ironmonger (to Virginia in 1651) as a "gateway ancestor"?

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As an Australian I use the term gateway ancestor in a broad sense sometimes, in casual discussions. But I know that the American use of the term has such a quasi-official status, and this stemming from their important tradition of work on this subject in a specific way, that it would be confusing to use the term in any discussion where the context is unclear, unless I am using the American sense.

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there's "gateway ancestors" and then there's the WikiTree category "Gateway Ancestors". The category is part of WikiTree's Magna Carta Project. See the category page for details (or an answer I posted in another G2G thread), but short answer: pre-1700 Colonial American immigrant descendants of a Magna Carta Surety Baron who have been documented in Douglas Richardson's Magna Carta Ancestry and Royal Ancestry - could be PGM too, as well as other WikiTree projects.

a while back, there was a discussion about Australian gateways & also about MCSB English descendants who never emigrated & the decision of the Magna Carta Project at the time was remain focused on those trails documented by Richardson and to not expand the project to include non-immigrants/immigrants to other than Colonial America. I can see if I can find that G2G discussion if you're interested, but it might be better to start a new one.

P.S. William Ironmonger is definitely a Gateway - his trail was completed/reviewed by the Magna Carta project September 2015.

Answer 3

As an example, the PGM Project has always been clear that Robert Charles Anderson's Great Migration works are used "unless there is more recent published research that corrects or adds" to them. Which there has been, and will continue to be, including revisions and updates from the GM team itself.

Anderson's GM and Richardson's RA are significant works in their genre because they are broad, comprehensive, with a consistent data structure/format, relatively accessible even to the beginner, and they exhaustively document their sources and explain their methods, allowing their research and conclusions to be reproduced, extended, or refuted by others. It would be ridiculous to hold such publications to any standard of perfection, since that is not how historical scholarship works, but their rigor and overall reliability are indisputable.

Large complex Projects like PGM and MC need a shared baseline around which their many participants can find common ground. Without it, the work would be unmanageable; thousands of significant profiles could resemble this G2G thread, an outcome the WikiTree leadership strives mightily to avoid. It makes absolute and complete sense that the Projects would choose GM and RA respectively, because the qualities mentioned above that these works share (broad, accessible, consistent, reproducible, falsifiable) also make them wonderfully suited to collaborative wikiwork.

Of course history doesn't freeze the moment someone writes it down. There is always new research and the possibility of new data coming to light which could revise or upend prior conclusions. That is how scholarship rightly works. Both Projects already acknowledge this.

I wonder if we are getting wrapped around the axle unnecessarily by the word "master" in the original question? I found it a curious choice of word, especially because some seem to be choosing to interpret it in the sense of superlative (making it a matter of opinion and debate) rather than one of the neutral senses, like principal or even from which duplicates [or derivatives] are made. Perhaps it is worth pointing out that neither PGM nor MC refers to GM or RA as a "master" source on their Project page, a fact which I know because I wrote both of them.

Could we simply agree that these are starting sources, and not "master" anythings, and might that allow us to de-escalate the rhetoric a bit?

Comments

Thanks Cheryl, there was a similar thread about the use of Medieval Lands by Charles Cawley as the starting point for the European Aristocrats project, and that came to the same conclusion that it was fine as a starting point, but shouldn't be considered the absolute authority.