Paston Family pre-1500

Question

Hello! i have reached out to some leaders without a response so let me try here. I am a Paston family scholar. The family wrote the largest collection of personal letters from 1400s on from a middle class family. It allowed a direct look into the lives of medieval England as told by non-royalty or clergy. There are several awesome documentaries by Helen Castor on youtube.  The Paston on this website lacks accuracy and really needs better bio's.  I am willing to dedicate my time but I am a couple of weeks short of being able to qualify for the badge.  I am deeply troubled by the amount of lineage connected to ancestors that have no solid documentation and are often listed as "disputed" yet they remain on the tree which is very misleading to those thinking they are related to certain people.  At the minimum we need to get the Paston line correct.

Thanks!

Answer 1

I agree that they are in a very sorry state ( just a quick check suggests Clement's death date is incorrect and that he left a will)  

It's great that you want to improve them.I would suggest that you spend a bit of time working on post 1500 profiles and learning the quirks of wiki-tree, especially how to create and  format citations , using primary and well sourced secondary sources. The Pastons are of course themselves an important primary source. This should enable you to get a pre 1500 badge and then be able to  work on them  yourself.

I also suggest that you join the England project and google group, others may be keen to assist.I would have thought that this family should warrant  excellent profiles with project protected status.

Lastly, from personal experience, when you start to work on these profiles, ask to be on the trusted list. I didn't realise this and have put a lot of work in on existing ,  open profiles that but now find it hard to keep track of them.

Comments

I've added what I can to Clement's bio, I'm no expert and it was what I could find with a bit of internet research. I managed to find an abstract of his will and changed his death date

If there is anything missing or incorrect, please shout!

Edit: have found many mentions of the fraudulent pedigree. What I lack is sight of the original analysis. Most cite the Davis editions of the Paston letters .

It would be good to include more detail about this. This could then be appended to the profiles of his false ancestors and the line detached from Clement.

Clement would then need to be project protected to prevent them being reattached.

Answer 2

I have read several books on the Pastons, a great medieval family. I have a pre-1500 badge---so if you want to send me any changes, sources, bios etc, I can post them to the profiles.

Answer 3

Hi Michele -- responding to the phrase "but they remain on the tree."  The answer is that with very rare exceptions, like pre BCE profiles, we do not delete profiles once they are created.  That means once a profile is created, if it turns out to be a duplicate, we can merge it into the proper profile, or if it turns out to be fiction, we can document why it is a fiction and detach it from all other profiles (because people who never existed can't have parents, spouses, or children!)  But once a profile is created, every possible step reqauires research and documentation.  That is why the "wild west" days when WikiTree began and anything went up on line are over and we're much more careful now about creating profiles, especially pre-1700 and pre-1500.  But the poor profiles already created are waiting for the steady hand of researchers like yourself!

Comments

The important thing is to document the changes you make so that when a profile ends up totally detached from the tree, we understand how it got that way....

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I completely understand. The profile should not be deleted Incase it can be properly connected with proof. Simply allowing to remain someone’s parent just because someone created the profile is not logical.  For those doing quick google searches into their surnames will pull up a wikitree lineage that connected based upon Irresponsible genealogy and take it as fact. As we know the internet never lies. Unless this is corrected this websight is much like the others and ment to be used as possible leads or fairytale construction. One cannot simply print their tree on this sight and call it accurate.