I've been posting Military Service so I guess I'm active - not sure how I'd prove it.

rsl

Thanks for the reply. Let me rephrase the question, Roy.

You received the Military and War badge 11 Sep 2019. Each year the projects check the members if they have been active in the project, if they want to remain in the project. Thus my earlier question.

I tried to go through your many WikiTree contributions. You have a lot. I do not have time to thoroughly search each member's contributions.

Surely you might have a memory of ancestors who were in World War II, World War I, Vietnam, Civil War, etc.

That is my question to you. Have you worked on Military and War ancestors or people who would have fought in the Military and Wars. Do you want to remain in the project??

Thanks ahead of time, if you could take a look.

Mary

I add one or two Stetsons, and other family members, who have military service, every week, so I am active in the area.

Please keep me in the project, and I'll keep adding Military service and the stickers as I go.

OK? rsl

Thanks, Roy, for the positive Check in. That is what I wanted to hear. I tried to find the ancestors or just profiles as you stumble upon them. I didn't take long enough. Marking you as active, and CAPABLE of doing more,?

Mary

I added the pages in "The Descendants...." to Jeremiah's Profile so we can refer to them more easily. Unfortunately, Barbara Merrick's updates to the first 2 books don't carry into the 3rd book, where Jeremiah's family is recorded

It certainly looks like they are duplicates of other of Jeremiah's children, and my "other" source, Family Search, has 12 children recorded, including the duplicates, primarily using the baptism dates.

So, do we merge Stetson-125 into Stetson-122 (same given names, David)which resolves that one, but which daughter is actually Eliza (Stetson-126) ? I might hazard a guess that Emeline/Eveline is the prime candidate, they both begin with E,

As a personal preference, I'd also move your long explanation of the duplicates into the Research Notes section, primarily because we can then footnote the two children that were involved in the merge, but since we don't have a time machine to go back to visit Jeremiah, I think your explanation and evaluation is as accurate as we'll get.

rsl

Hi, Roy.

Thanks for your thoughtful reply. That long explanation was written largely for you and for anyone else who might happen to be involved with the profiles for David and Eliza (apparently it was just you and me). Now that the duplicates are resolved, I will trim it and convert it to a Research Note.

I merged "Eliza" into Louisa's profile. I'm rather sure that Louisa was the girl baptized in 1824. Eveline was married by then and would not have been one of the baptized children, whereas Louisa was just 11 years old and should have been one of the baptism group. Also, I think "Louisa" and "Eliza" are similar-sounding names, making it very possible that Louisa got recorded as Eliza (initial letters are not the only aspect of names that can be confused).

Although WikiTree accepts them as sources for post-1700 profiles, those Family Search profiles are not reliable sources (see the discussion of "User-contributed trees" in Space:United_States_Project_Reliable_Sources#Unreliable Sources). Ideally, we should not treat them as "sources" for any purpose other than hints. Now that the content in Jeremiah's profile here is thoroughly supported by citations to vital records and other quality sources, we should not list the FamilySearch profile as if it is equivalent to those other sources. (It still may have value for hints on topics not documented in the profile, like what happened to Jeremiah after 1855, but I don't like to promote a webpage that mistakenly gives Jeremiah 12 children.)

The published Weymouth vital records, which I believe are viewable online for free at the NEHGS website as well as on archive.org, are the best (closest to primary) available source for the story of the births of the children (what Stetson Kindred and Sprague both used as sources for the children's births, even if not specifically cited). In the vital records, the entries for birth and baptism are neatly paired for most of the children, making it fairly evident that (for example) Julia Ann born in 1823 is the same as Julia Ann baptized in 1824.

Regarding personal preference, ideally a parent's profile would not include complete life summaries for each of their children. That's the way published genealogies typically report things, and it makes sense in WikiTree when we aren't yet in a position to create a complete profile with biography for each of the children, but ideally the children's life details would be documented (and sourced) in separate profiles for each child. I think the children's births are important parts of the lives (and thus the biographies) of the parents, and it helps to see all them in one profile where we can spot patterns within the family, but the kids deserve their own profiles -- and when mistaken family connections are discovered, it is far easier to disaggregate the erroneous family connections when each person has separate profile with sources for each fact.

Ellen

I personally consider Family Search to be on the same level as Ancestry, Find A Grave, and several other sites where people can contribute data about their family.

Do I unequivocally trust the information on the individual Family Search profile pages?

Of course not, but really, their profiles are developed much the same way that WikiTree develops them, as a consensus of information from interested parties, To that end, I add the FS profiles as a "see also" source because it is a more central repository for viewing documents AND it only requires registration to use it. (There is probably an elegant way to qualify the source reference, but the information is no better or worse than that on Ancestry, or Find A Grave, and I'd hate to have to generate detailed profiles without the roadmap that all three can provide.)

NEHGS requires a fee to look at almost every document, including those also found in open websites. I joined American Ancestors so I could gain access, and it does cost me a few bucks a year. I tend to put "Behind Paywall" on any references found on paid sites, so my fellow "cheapskates" don't waste time looking.

The fact that I know Barbara Merrick from the SKOA influences me to take everything from "The Descendants..." and Barry as almost Gospel, but Barbara has generated an entire replacement document for Vol I, No 1 & 2, and there are more than a couple changes found in those unpublished documents. Linda HIross (and I) are working on presenting those updates in some usable form, remembering that the new works are copyrighted.

As I work into the 20th century on my various lines, I'm starting to use the Census Bureau's site for the 1950 census, but you better know where someone lived before you try to dig into that area. Once again, Family Search has a pretty robust search engine that allows me find and to view the actual Census Records.

And one more note: Just about everything we used to document the Stetson family is a derivative source. NEHGS records were all copied from the original, typos and mistakes included. O.F. Stetson, & company all copied records that existed somewhere at some time, but they are also not original documents and as Barbara once told me, her copies of the Descendants... was so annotated that it was sometimes hard to read, so even our SKOA records are suspect.

But digging up the correct info is part of the allure of doing all this... isn't it?

Have a happy New Year. rsl

Hi, Roy. Happy New Year!

Regarding FamilySearch: It's not just your opinion that the FamilySearch tree profiles are on the same level as those other sites. That's also the "official" WikiTree opinion documented in places like Space:United States Project Reliable Sources#Unreliable Sources. At one time, many WT profiles were based entirely, or nearly so, on unreliable sources like those (if any sources were cited), because that was the content that was contributed, and other members may not have had the wherewithal to validate the info, particularly if we were busy merging numerous duplicate profiles for the person. If a profile includes data cited to unreliable that hasn't been confirmed or refuted by reliable evidence, we will continue to show those citations until better data and sources can be substituted, WikiTree's credibility suffers when we continue to maintain profiles that appear to treat garbage sources as equivalent to high-quality sources. I appreciate that you know that these sources are less reliable than sources like Stetson Kindred (which is in turn less credible than some other secondary sources, because it is often not apparent where SK got its information), but I see plenty of evidence of members and other users who do not understand those kinds of distinctions (and there are others who personally castigate me because I am Project Leader for projects that have not completely expunged bad "sources" from the profiles they manage). Once a profile like the one for Jeremiah Stetson is fully supported by reasonably good evidence, there is no excuse for listing/citing a user-contributed tree in a manner that makes it appear to be of equivalent quality to a source like Stetson Kindred or The Great Migration series. I will leave low-quality "sources" on profiles (maybe when they support "facts" that have not been found or refuted anywhere else, if the "source" is inaccessible to me and I can't tell what information supposedly came from it, or to provide "hints"), but I think we need to find ways to distinguish those citations from good sources -- don't footnote a FamilySearch profile or the Ancestral File as if it has the same value as the vital records entry we cite, and don't use the same "See also" label for both books we cite in footnotes (or believe to be reliable sources for the whole profile) and untrustable family trees.

Also, more than a few members have the misguided notion that "sources" found online for free are always better to cite than reliable information sources that require something like a subscription, a book purchase, or an in-person library visit. Yes, if the same source can be viewed online for free, it's better to cite the free location, but (for example) an online family tree that reports the same birth date and birthplace as a vital record is never a better citation than the vital record. I don't like to promote the "free is better" notion (much less the fallacy that WikiTree requires that all profiles be supported by free online sources).

A good bit of the content on AmericanAncestors (such as the pre-1850 Massachusetts vital records) is online for free. Unfortunately, those of us who are paying subscribers have a hard time telling what's free, because we would need to log in from a registered guest account to be able to see what's free.

It's good to hear about your progress toward producing updates for the Stetson Kindred books. I do think that the discipline of citing primary sources as a basis for facts would improve the credibility of the books and would make it easier to investigate possible errors in the future (but that may exceed what's possible in your update effort). Much of the SK content does appear to come from vital records, census records, gravestones, wills and deeds, but it's sometimes hard to tell... I appreciate the Waldo Chamberlain Sprague work on the genealogies of Braintree families, but that [secondary] source can pose interesting paradoxes because Sprague himself was also the source of many of the vital records for Braintree and Randolph, and I believe that he relied on the Stetson Kindred books for more that a little of his information on the Stetsons.

I don't guess that you have an Ancestry subscription. Their index of the 1950 U.S. Census is not perfect, but it's much more efficient than the Census website for finding records from that census.

Ellen

I actually do have a basic level membership in American Ancestors, and will go digging through there if I don't like the number of references I have for one of my family members who are from New England, etc.

It is interesting that WT has all this discussion about the limitations of Family Search, yet has specific programs built into their system to incorporate FS over many other sources.

In the past few years, I've also come to the realization that we probably will never uncover a treasure trove of early town documents, allowing us to show actual pictures of the vital records of these towns.

I am trying to think of language to put on a Family Search profile to indicate that I am using that profile as a sort of index to an open source of documents. From time to time, I will reference the family lists shown on FS, but I'll only do that if I have no other source, derivative or original to give me the framework.

But the WT leadership has to decide if the hard links to FS are justified given their position that FS is not a valid source under the WT rules.

rsl

The volunteer leadership of the WikiTree projects that regularly tangle with early genealogy is a good bit more negative toward user-contributed "sources" like Family Search profiles, Geni, FindaGrave, etc., than is the site ownership. To be fair, some of the Family Search profile collection started out as the Pedigree Resource File and the IGI, which were supposed to have some quality control, and that legacy gave the data some credibility at one time, but at some point unvetted contributions from unidentified contributors started to be commingled with those data sets. Also, I think it's fair to say that user-contributed content for the last 175 years or so is more likely to be correct (because it is more likely to be based on reasonably good family records and oral histories) than user-contributed content for earlier times, but the reliability of "tradition" probably still depends strongly on factors like family stability and the literacy levels of family members. (That makes it reasonable to accept -- or at least tolerate --- these sources for 19th and 20th century genealogy.) Also, in the last few years Family Search has improved the way user-contributed profiles are managed, so there is now a good bit more quality control for them, but it's still user-contributed content (like WikiTree, which also is user-contributed). I happen to prefer the way WikiTree deals with conflicting and disputed genealogy to the way it is handled at Family Search (here the emphasis is strongly on evidence, whereas Family Search seems to have more of a "prevailing opinion" approach to resolving conflicts).

I've been fooling with different approaches for dealing with the inclusion/retention of unreliable sources. Here are a few examples from problematic profiles I've dealt with recently.

• https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/De_Voor-55 - "See also" section is set off from the other sources.
• https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/UNKNOWN-30016 - Explicit note about unreliable sources (added so I could "archive" the profile comments that discussed the Ancestral File).
• https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Woertman-85 - See the Research Note about Find a Grave.

-- Ellen

PS - My comment about "Ancestry" subscription was in relation to Ancestry.com, not AmericanAncestors. I don't particularly like Ancestry.com, but their search functions are superior, including for finding 1950 census records.

Yes I'm still here, and stuck in the early 1700 in Ayrshire. I probably spend only an hour a month on my family from Scotland, the bulk of my work is with the Stetson Family of Massachusetts, but from time to time I dig around to see if anything new has popped up from all the work they are doing at Scotlands People.

So keep me on the list, you never know when that breakthru record will appear.

rsl

Hi Roy,

Thanks for replying. You're not the only one - I've got several brick walls in 1700s Ayrshire!

Sheena

I am still interested in the Great War (WW I) since my Grandfather served in France during that conflict.

rsl

I've only added several lines of Stetsons, including several Civil War and Revolutionary War Vets.

Thank you Roy, for the reply to the Military and war Check in. I marked you as Active.

Mary

I'll see if I can help her - but I'd need a birth date because there are several Oliver Stetsons in the 1800's.

The Stetson Books don't have a Leah H. Kearns in the first 3 volumes - and she is not in Volume 4 or 5 either.

The only thing the LDS has on Leah is her marriage to Oliver, nothing else.

Go down to the bottom of the page for Marshall Stetson Jr, and you will see the merge section, compare the two profiles and then merge them (its in green on the top of the page where the two profiles are side by side).

Once Cheryl approves of the merger, you willsee the parents of Marshall fill in and you'll see all of the ancestors too.

As you add new family members, make sure you check the potential matches as you put them in, it will save you a lot of data entry, and will fill in the tree pretty fast.

FWIW - I'm a full member of the Stetson Kindred of America and on the Board of Directors. I used DNA to prove that my G-G-Grandmother was actually a Stetson and not adopted into the family.

If I can help you work through WT's quirks, so much the better - I'm sure you have a lot of source documents to add to the mix.

rsl

I certainly would like to connect my Lamberton family from Ayrshire to the greater Lamberton list but I think I'm the only one working that surname in the Ayrshire group, so it hard to collaborate when you're working by yourself.

To make things more difficult, I am neck deep in building out the various branches of the Stetson family (one of my Mother's line) and tend to get sucked into working on those Profiles instead of my more immediate family.

It is my belief that I will somehow have to get to Ayrshire to really dig into my Lamberton roots, altho I plan to try to find my G-Grandfather's trips back and forth before he settled in New York City. My yDNA tests show Lamrocks who have roots where he was living as a child, but there are times I wonder if his Obituary is true.

FWIW - I find all the "welcome to" and "congratulations on the Tartan Trail" e-mail a bit much. I know we are supposed to be friendly and all, but 10-15 congratulations every time someone moves up a rung can overload an e-mail system quickly. (I have the same complaint about the Data Doctor threads as well.)

But keep up the good work - at some point my off WikiTree Lamberton group will have a breakthrough and then I'll have more to add. Right now I'm mired in New England and Upstate New York, Chasing Stetsons about the north woods.

rsl

I am on the Google Group, but my family is from Ayrshire and there isn't much there about the SW Lands.

rsl

Thanks for checking in Roy! Are you on our Ayrshire team? I can't remember off the top of my head. I am also on that team, as my Crawfords are from there. Please feel free to reach out to the team leader if you need anything.

Not sure how much research your team is doing that overlaps with mine - it seems that the entire Scotland Project revolves around completing the "Tartan Trail" and trading congratulations when someone finishes a leg. Maybe I'm missing something here, but more feedback on tracking families in the various shires would be more useful (to me.) More detailed help on using the Scotland's People site, adding more individuals to the tree, working with the Masonic Lodge (Kilwinning) or clarifying Find A Grave data, would help those of us who have hit a wall, move forward.

Doing more with DNA, particularly yDNA and auDNA would be good as well, but I know we need a lot more of our fellow Scotts to step up and get some of the testing done.

rsl

Thanks for your feedback, Roy. Please do feel free to use the Google Group to ask questions about the families you are researching, or asking for specific help with other areas you mention. The Project tries to address all suggestions/questions put forward.

I work on the source-a-thon but as a member of the Nor'Easters since most of the profiles I manage are from that area. My g-grandmother was a Stetson, and I keep busy maintaining those family profiles.

rsl

If they are not locked, go ahead and add information that corrects the confusion.,

I'm a little surprised that they are consecutively numbered - but then I am not on either Profile as a PM, and I don't think I've edited anything on them outside of maybe the Clean A Thon....

I think when originally entered, they were correctly shown as father and son, but when someone merged the Fales-53 with Fales-161 (? I forgot the other number at the moment) that made the dates wonky. I will try to fix so it makes more sense. One difficulty, is that there is not any real proof that these two are actually father and son. It is an assumption that has been perpetrated, and too many believe it to be true, without documentation, so it continues...