You Cannot Believe Everything That You Read

Post date: Jan 28, 2015 5:52:28 AM

The episode of the Genealogy Roadshow - Philadelphia: Franklin Institute (season 2, episode 3) which aired 27 January 2015, provided a great example of a very common problem encountered by aspiring genealogists. People who have hit brick walls in researching their family histories often look for books that mention or even contain biographies about their ancestors. Many of these books were written 100 or more years ago, although some are not quite as old. These books are frequently given credible sounding titles, including words such as "Biographical", or "The History of _____ County", or even "The First Documented History of _____".

It is important to understand that, much like the myriad publicly published trees online today, these books usually contain inaccurate and at times downright fictitious information. They have been used by prominent families to clean up or re-create the their family backgrounds, and, quite frankly, a more notable background makes for a more interesting read. I don't mean to imply that all of the errors and inaccuracies in these books were written knowingly. In many cases, the information is based on rumor, family lore, or 3rd, 4th, or 5th-hand information, and believe to be true, while in other cases, the errors may be purely accidental. Regardless of the cause, it is important to treat the information contained within these books as suspect at best.

If you manage to find one or more lines of your family tree mentioned in one of these books, you may notice that it is rare that anyone mentioned in theses books had had an ordinary family history. Most people mentioned in these books had ancestors who descended from royalty, had shared lineage with a notable famous person or families, or who's ancestors were somehow otherwise noteworthy. It is rare to find that a person or a family covered in one of these books, while noteworthy in and of themselves, who had descended from an inauspicious lineage.

Once most researchers find their ancestral families mentioned in one of these books, there is a tendency to believe everything contained therein. The reasoning frequently goes something like this:

"The book was written and published 100 years ago, and it contains detailed information about my grandparent, my great grandparents, and about their parents; information that I know to be true based on the documentation and family photographs and documents that I have seen, therefore, everything else that the book says must be true. It says that we descend from Marco Polo, so that must be true too!"

It is as if the information obtains added validity with age and because it was published. "Its in a book, so it must be true!"

Unfortunately, these "source books" usually do not identify the source of the information contained therein, and they almost never contain or even reference any actual documentation to prove the grand histories that they contain. As the "history" described gets further away from the date of its writing, the information becomes increasingly less accurate/reliable.

Getting back to the Genealogy Roadshow, in this most recent episode, Joshua Taylor works with a couple who have successfully traced their lineage back to the husband's 9th or 10th great-grandfather (in the dialogue, they say "10th", but the tree that they display showed "9th"), Nathaniel Dickinson (1601 - 1676). This is great work, especially if they did this through original research (and not by finding it in a book somewhere)!

From there, they relied on a book that contained what sounds like the accepted history of this particular Nathaniel Dickinson, which is, that he descends from Viking royalty. The book had been published in 1897, and had been compiled by Frederick Dickinson. It describes in detail how Nathaniel had been born in 1600 in Ely, Cambridge, England to William Dickinson and Sarah Stacey, and then proceeds to show his lineage as the Dickinson surname changed from its current spelling, through "Dickensonne", "Dykensonne", "Dykenson", "Dykonson" to "de Kenson" and ultimately to "de Caen" back in 1200's.

It all sounds very convincing, and certainly very impressive. Then the book takes the leap from the 1200's to a Viking king. Unfortunately, a true and accurate genealogy reveals a very different lineage. The previously established genealogy described in the above-mentioned book was debunked as early as 1998. A description of Nathaniel's true (and proven) genealogy was published in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register. That said, if you go online today, you will find literally THOUSANDS of genealogies based on the incorrect contents of the 1897 book! These false genealogies have been published by thousands of individuals who believe that they have accurately "done their genealogies". Odds are that, if these genealogies relied on a single source book, or if they relied on other genealogies that in turn simply relied on that source book, they contain other errors (and false branches) as well.

Right off the bat, the book's genealogy is off. It turns out that Nathaniel had been baptized nearly 10 years earlier than his purported birth of 1600 (he was baptized in 1591), and the baptism had been in Billingborough, Lincolnshire, England, which isn't really all that close to Ely (where the book stated he had been born). It is about 90 minutes away by car on today's roads, from Ely, Cambridge, England, so it is unlikely that Nathaniel had been born in Ely, and certainly not 9 years after had been baptized far away from there. More importantly, the book also states that he was the son of William Dickinson and Sarah Stacey, where he was actually the son of John Dickinson and his wife Elizabeth.

The program made it clear that Nathaniel's true lineage continued to deviate from that described in the book, and it ultimately results in a lineage that is not traced back to Viking royalty.

The stories contained in these books are fantastic, and belief in them can be extremely attractive. These books can also appear to be a great short-cut to discovering your lineage. Unfortunately, if you cannot find and evaluate the documentation that clearly supports the information contained in these books, I wouldn't believe it.