Advice before adding father of this pre-1700 Thompson profile?

Question

I can add a father to the profile of James Thompson. This is who I can add:andrew thompson

These are the sources I am using:

• family trees

Should I contact one of the pre-1700 projects or know about any style guidelines before proceeding? Thank you!

Answer 1

Hi Bob,

First of all: Thanks for the many (over 2500 in only 2 months!) contributions you are making on Wikitree! Also thanks for asking advice here on g2g when you're in any doubt.

I had a look at the profile of James Thompson, and also at some other profiles you added, and I noticed that you often use "family trees", without further details, as only source. Certainly for the (pre-1500) James Thompson profile, but also for pre-1700, and in fact almost all profiles it would be good to be more specific.

A good source citation informs other users on what exactly your source is and how they can access that source (and the easier you can make that for them, the better). The benefit for the profiles you manage is that other users are more inclined to trust the information when you provide a detailed source citation (even if they don't actually check the source). And above all: it facilitates collaboration on those profiles.

I'm not implying that any of the information you provided is wrong, just that, without source, there's no way for me and others to form an idea about it.

Here and here is some more information!

Best regards,

Filip 

Answer 2

I believe that Filip answered this very well and respectfully. I wanted to support his response and (as a Thompson) see if I couldn't find a source example for you. I moved a few generations forward to Jacob Thompson. Using familysearch.org, I found several user submitted trees. The first things I noticed is that the submitted trees vary slightly in dates from yours and only one actually had a source. This is pretty common and you will find that a source citing a user tree is considered an unsourced profile. So digging into the one user submitted tree with a source, I see it was found on Ancestry.com referencing a published genealogy book titled "The Kilpatrick family : ancestors and descendants of Marian Douglas Jones and Robert Jackson Kilpatrick : with related families". well I don't have an Ancestry account so I can't look there. But I know it is probably available on Google Books for free. So I search there and find the book and then search the book contents more and find eleven pages where Jacob Thompson is mentioned. Here is a link to that page. 

https://books.google.com/books?id=tSlWAAAAMAAJ&dq=The+Kilpatrick+family+ancestors+and+descendants+of+Marian+Douglas+Jones+and+Robert+Jackson+Kilpatrick+with+related+families+%22Jacob+Thompson%22&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=Jacob+thompson

I stopped at this point, but it looks like the same Jacob Thompson in your tree with the research done 9n him at the time this was published. This is the kind of info we are looking for to classify this as a sourced profile. 

I know others will know more than I about this book and I hope they comment. I will say with older profiles, it is hard to find good sources.  Ultimately, we want to know why you think the info is correct. This book is a secondary source but it is better than a user submitted profiles and give future researchers a place to start. Thanks for your work so far. It is appreciated.