Posted By:	THOMAS GULL
	Email:
	Subject:	Re: Any Y-DNA results on desc of Frederick Platt - Killingworth Ct?
	Post Date:	May 11, 2009 at 19:12:11
	Message URL:	http://genforum.genealogy.com/platt/messages/1800.html
	Forum:	Platt Family Genealogy Forum
	Forum URL:	http://genforum.genealogy.com/platt/

Thanks, Dick, I think I read your thread and some others online that quoted the same source. Notice it's written 150 years after the events, and I have some in my own family that are like that where the facts are clearly garbled when you look at other evidence. I'm thinking particularly of one written by someone in 1912 talking about people in the late 1700s. A marriage was described and I was thinking "no, the writer must not have realized she was in the wrong generation and old enough to be William's mother" - followed by the sudden realization that "she" WAS William's mother, and the story had generations mixed up but the right names overall. Anyway, in this Connecticut context, we're asked to believe that a person living in the middle of multiple Platt (sometimes Platts) families of English descent somehow was instead a German sailor with incredibly bad luck who was shipwrecked going east across the Atlantic three times, always close enough to end up back in America - in a time period when German immigrants in that area seem to be virtually undocumented today. It's 20 years too early, being generous, and in the wrong place. It's technically not impossible, but it's highly unlikely. It's a complicated somewhat incredible bad luck / good luck tale (notice three shipwreck survivals) vs. a very simple and possible explanation for a rare New England surname. You couldn't rule out the improbable yet but you'd bet the other way if it was money or your life. Y-DNA evidence, on the other hand, probably could definitely say "part of the English family or not". "Not" still wouldn't prove the German tale was true, but it would remove or confirm the most likely possibility. / Tom