Need help sorting out tangled roots
I have branch in my tree where several families intermarried frequently, over a period of several generations — from the late 1600s to early 1800s in New York. These interwoven branches then named their children with many of the same names.
The result is I may have 5 to 10 individuals who would have been living at a given time and in a small geographic area, with the same first and last name. Even probate records I've found so far aren't a great help because of the intensive name repetition.
This situation is compounded by the numerous errors that are being repeated ad infinitum in online trees, where people believe they have found a match since the person has the same name they were looking for. For this group of families, I believe there is more wrong information online than correct information.
Here's a quick example: I have a Jacob Gosseline, b. ca 1701 in England, d. 1722, at Newtown, Long Island, New York. He had at least 4 sons: Josse (Joseph/Joost), Jacob, Samuel and John. His son Josse named his sons: Samuel, Jacob, William, Joseph, John, James, Daniel, Richard, Thomas and Benjamin. Of those sons, they named sons Samuel, Richard, James, Joseph, William and John. The surname morphed into Gosline or Gorsline, and for a PA branch, to Goslin, yet throughout the 1700s all variations are present in census, probate and other records.
Has anyone had great success in sorting out a convoluted mess like this? I would rather leave a connection open than to make an incorrect assumption.
In some cases, there are published genealogies that list names with family ties and birth dates, but there is no substantial proof provided with those genealogies, so I'm not comfortable using the information.
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Re: sorting out tangled roots
You remarks about the frequency of iconic names is an experience noted, one which has led to many false starts. We have often attributed a person sharing a surname in a small place to be allotted to a specific family, only to find out later that that person could never possibly belong to that same family of origin. Once an error has circulated on-line, it will be a persistent annoyance, hard to remove from the on-line copy-mill.
Your query seems to indicate that you have a realistic assessment of the hazards of jumping back several generations at once. Alas! sometime the temptation to link into other PMTs is great, I find there is a lot to learn, and more to unlearn, from other people's trees. I like to collect the names of all the children of a couple and try to chart them in birth order.
I pay close attention to the mother of children, her age at marriage, date of marriage, spacing between children, and the sequence of children. In families where the bride married at 18, she may have had issue every two years for over twenty years; in other situations, the mother died in childbirth after giving birth to a few children; the spouse may have remarried locally within a year. I've found that I've had to guess/estimate the year of birth for relatively obscure children; doing so helped me a great deal in building up a realistic chronology for each of the biological couples. The chronology model is an inventory of what facts you do know and can surmise by interpreting the less clear items. Your intuition is your guide, is is wise to treat most on-line trees as suspect.
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Re: sorting out tangled roots
Thank you, Aldo. Do you use a spreadsheet to track these individuals? I don't like to add undocumented people to my trees. I do like the idea of using hypothetical dates to help visualize what a family looked like and how it may connect to others.
I find I don't use the user-submitted trees for much beyond clues for possible connections and where to look for evidence. I do find it frustrating that people seem so quick to make a "connection" that they don't even stop to look for evidence.
I do have evidence (baptism and marriage records) that I would like to attach to individuals in my tree, however, I'm not sure which John Gosselin the records actually belong to, since I have 4 or 5 John Gosselin's (Gosline, Goslin, Gorsline) living in the same area during the same period of time. This scenario is repeated with at least 10 other names for this surname, and then again for 2 of the family's collateral lines.
It's not that I don't have evidence — it's how to sort out the many people with similar names, so I can attach the evidence to the right one! I suppose this is a good problem to have.
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Re: sorting out tangled roots
One strategy is to focus on the mother of the child, provided she has an uncommon name, so that you try to link the children to the mother, rather than to the father with the repeated proper name. It is not always possible. I would spend energy on documenting the wives carefully, you may be surprised at what conclusions one is enabled to tease out from the distaff side.
Descent groups who repeatedly use the same legal names often adopt nicknames as a private shorthand among themselves. Huge lineages use "clan" nicknames for subgroups, clan descriptors are often linked to anecdotes about character, occupation, physical features, or the geographic location of the residential house (while tradition is patrilocal, some men did move to their wife's property, when she was an heiress).
With surnames, the spelling eventually is standard in each branch, so the different spelling variants may actually help you to sort out the individuals by alloting some to a descent subgroup.
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Re: sorting out tangled roots
I have similar issues. In addition to the strategies suggested up-thread, it can be very helpful to use sources that are not always online, such as local tax and property records, school records (if extant), etc.
Tracing all the individuals in the district that share the surname is usually helpful in making sense of the various branches.
Obtaining wills of the parents of people who married into the common surname can sometimes provide useful information on names of children and grandchildren who can be tied to the parents who had less common surnames.
Use other peoples' research only as a guide to potentially useful sources and start from a clean sheet with your own interpretation; this will avoid copying potential errors by previous researchers.
Good luck!
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