How can you quote Parish Register dates for BMD when English Parish registers do not exist for those dates?

Question

I am a Genealogist in Totnes Devon England who has been asked to comment on a Chapin Family tree from this site. Most of it is erroneous and it is quite distressing. Totnes Registers do not commence until 1556 so a baptism of 1509 is totally unsupported..

Comments

Your expertise is what we hope will keep Wikitree on the straight and narrow. Many of us don't have that type of access, and only hope we get it right. Much information here has been adapted from Ancestry.com and may be erroneous. We hope the errors can be either corrected or noted as errors.

Many thanks.

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My colleague and I in Totnes Museum Study Centre would like to offer you all free advice and our knowledge of England and especially Devon to help you with your genealogy.  We can point you to helpful sources and also check your data for you if are stuck or do not trust a source that you have found. We will happily check the original parish registers for you if we can and also provide information about places in Devon, which is not on the Internet.

 For example there is a comment on the internet at present(GENI) which states that the place "Hull" or "Hole" cannot be found in Devon therefore the family of "Holcombe" could not come from Devon and must have come from the city of Hull.  This is entirely incorrect.  The Holcombes from Hull(Hole) owned the land and lived at Hull which is near Branscombe in Devon.  Looking on a present day map Branscombe can be found near Sidmouth in Devon.  The Vivian Visitations of Devon state that the Holcombes were at Hull before 1480 and Hoskins in his book "Devon" states that the Holcombes lived there until the 17century.

Unfortunately we cannot offer a free service to actually research your family tree as all research is charged at £7:50 per hour and all proceeds go towards the upkeep of Totnes Museum.  My colleague and I are volunteers and do not get paid.  But we will help you if we can.

Email    totnes.museum@virgin.net       Jill Drysdale

Answer 1

A colleague and myself run a Study Centre attached to Totnes Museum we answer questions and do genealogical and local history research for enquirers both locally in Devon and in other countries we have also done research for authors, film directors  radio presenters and university lecturers.  We take our work very seriously and become quite upset when we discover trees on the internet which have very little relation to reality.

Firstly anyone doing family history research in England needs to acquaint themselves with the laws and customs of the country and get a basic knowledge of the history of England and especially the places in which their ancestors lived.  Each parish has a different start date for their parish registers .  These can be checked parish by parish at GENUKI/Devon.  County Record office holdings records can be checked at A2A and information on wills on several other sites. I could go on but will stop there.

I wish you all well but please please do not add unsupported facts to your tree

"probably" and "possiblly" have no place in genealogy.  Jill Drysdale

Comments

Hi Jill, For those of us that are unfamiliar, thank you for the database locations :

http://www.genuki.org.uk/index.html

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/

http://apps.nationalarchives.gov.uk/a2a/ Will be replaced in the fall by:

http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/

These will be added to Kitty's Library in short order if they are free-to-use resources.  I hope you add links for any other free-to-use resources you might tell us about.  We do want to document information as much as possible.  We have almost 8 million profiles here on WikiTree so we have plenty of documentation opportunities available if you would like to contribute and collaborate with us.  

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Re 'possibly' and probably'

Standards For Sound Genealogical Research
Recommended by the National Genealogical Society

''Limit with words like "probable" or "possible" any statement that is based on less than convincing evidence, and state the reasons for concluding that it is probable or possible''

http://www.ngsgenealogy.org/galleries/Ref_Researching/gssound.pdf

accessed 24 Aug 2014

Margaret

 

Answer 2

i know nothing about Totnes Parish Registers, but very few remain from the early days of compulsory registers  (in 1538 Cromwell ordered that every wedding, baptism and burial was to be recorded, but there are many omissions at this time and for several years afterwards).  http://www.parishregister.net/history.htm

To be fair to this profile, it doesn't actually mention a baptism in 1509, but a birth. There may or may not be supporting evidence for a birth.  If there is supporting evidence, it should be stated.

It could be an estimate for her birth year from an estimated marriage in 1530, in itself probably an estimate from son Roger's estimated birth in 1534, which may be an estimate from his marriage in 1565!!

Not until Roger Chapin-21 dies do you get an actual date given - 9 Sep 1590 in Falmouth.

Have you tried contacting the profile manager about it?

Margaret

Answer 3

Dear Anonymous,  Welcome to WikiTree.com and thank you for your question.

As a bit of background, WikiTree.com is a one worldwide family tree.  We each add our own branches, twigs and leaves (the leaves are called "profiles") to the same big family tree.  The goal is to have one leaf or profile for each person in the world on the WikiTree.

WikiTree is a collaborative family tree, so you can create or edit the profiles here and I can edit the same profiles to improve the information with a biography, pictures, sources and re-sources, and links to other family members with profiles on the WikiTree. These contributions of time, information and attention are donated by the WikiTree members for the benefit of the worldwide genealogy research community.

The profile that you linked to was created three years ago and very little has been done to improve it since that time.  It is very likely that the 1509 birthdate was a guess-timate. We are constantly trying to correct and improve the information that we have for all the profiles.  Any information that you or your client would like to contribute to this endeavour would be very much appreciated.

Of course, genealogy research is never finished.  We need to be constantly vigilant to check and recheck the sources listed on a profile and to look for new sources to add. As Tom said, we value your expertise and hope that you and your client will join our collaborative WikiTree.com community.

Answer 4

Well a quick look on IGI shows that the guesstimates range from 1490 to 1516 and the place was either Nettlestead Kent or Nettleden Herts or maybe not.

My guess would be that this stuff originated on the American side of the pond, in one of those typewritten "the great Plodsbury family" books where chapter 1 is usually a work of creative fiction, and the "data" got uploaded to IGI from there.

Answer 5

Just a quick wave to you from Blackawton (so about 10 miles away).  I moved here about 3 years ago - previously I was in Exeter and before then in Bridport, Dorset.

Totnes is such a wonderful place.  Once we are all out of lockdown I will have to take some time to explore the museum properly.