Chat
|
Daily Search
|
My GenForum
|
Community Standards
|
Terms of Service
|
|
|
Call me the lone dissenter, forgive my pessimism in advance, and know that I am not writing this to provoke spam or flames, just to hopefully provoke some serious consideration of an ancestral legend that has been taken as fact for far too long.
After 20 fruitless years of investigation, I have become quite weary of the utterly proofless ancestry of the prodigious polygamist named Elias Gardner, presumably of Vernon, Oneida, NY, of whom thousands claim descent (myself seemingly included) from his amazing stockpile of progeny: 43+/- children created from NINE wives. So often I have wondered, “Wouldn’t a man with 9 wives and 43 children possess more documented proof surrounding his obviously productive life and times?” One would think so -- do the math and the number of descendants of this one human being approaches exponential proportions – but all there is “out there” in the world of Elias descendants is a melodramatic, rather rickety, hit-or-myth fable passed around the generations about how Elias made shoes and taught dancing in Utah. How do you feed 43 children and nine wives on dance lessons? This same fairy tale also tells of his runaway father, William the Deserter…and the quixotic legend of William’s return to Tyringham, MA to gaze through a window at his abandoned wife. This pap continues with the romantic death of Ann/Nancy Graves – except there is no death date ever attributed to her. Who wrote this story?
I have yet to encounter one single person, descended or not, who questions this thoroughly unsubstantiated ancestry: of Elias Gardner as the son of the vague and mist-shrouded father, William of Tyringham, MA, who was allegedly married to the endlessly bifurcated Ann/Nancy Graves (and who’s own constantly guesstimated pedigree is but a wild conjectural spitting into the vast genealogical sea of Graves). I have yet to hear of, or personally discover, or see anyone else able to produce, one shred of true and actual, hard, cold evidence to support the lineage of Elias Gardner, as son of William Gardner/Nancy (Ann) Graves, through James Gardner/Alice Spink, through the three Rhode Island Nicholas Gardiners, through George Gardiner/Herodias Long of Greenford Magna, England. Obviously this lineage that everyone seems to accept on sheer faith percolates outward into the Gardner-related gedcoms of the world from the data originating in LDS Ancestral File. Well, pardon my heresy, but there’s simply no actual proof to support any of it.
The LDS Ancestral File (itself a Gardner-errored mess) and IGI databases contain dozens upon dozens of wildly fluctuating suppositions, but not one single document, parish register, church record, etc. that proves a thing – just a vast assortment of “temple work” and “sealings for the dead” by long-ago, deceased submitters now truly latter day. Where’s the evidence that Elias was born in Vernon, NY? Where’s the evidence that his father was William, that William deserted the family, that William was the son of James and Alice Spink Gardner/Gardiner, and so on, and so on? How was this seemingly spurious lineage originated that too many of us are buying into?
Please don’t shoot the messenger: respond only if you wish to dialogue about the SPECIFIC subject matter of this post.
Notify Administrator about this message?
Followups:
|
| http://genforum.genealogy.com/gardiner/messages/879.html | ||
 |
Agreement of Use Link to GenForum Add Forum |
|