Chat
|
Daily Search
|
My GenForum
|
Community Standards
|
Terms of Service
|
|
|
Since starting on this on-again, off-again quest for my family roots, I've been surprised at how easy it is for me to mess it up. We've had an example in this forum about which John Clark Ridpath we were talking about or exactly when James Ridpath was born. One of the problems with settling these questions is that to do it right takes the whole dusty trail of evidence and of often conflicting sources of information, and it's always much more fun to just say "yeah so-and-so Ridpath was born here/when and had X children" When you dig into the sources, you will find different dates of birth for the same person, or if you look at the marriage bond for James and Elizabeth, you might think Elizabeth's Maiden name was "Cole" not "Cox". To make matters worse, the bond is listed in the index as "Core". Which one is right?
One of the ways I have tried to overcome this problem is to document my sources, _especially_ if it is my own conclusions, such as a child born at a certain time/place must have had the same parents as another child born within a few years/miles. This makes the true answers to be of the style: According to the church record she was born on Jan 1,1900, but the 1910 census had her as 11 years old indicating a birth year of 1899.
This attention to the detail and evidence does make for slow going, especially as much incorrect data can get repeated multiple time. For example, it would be necessary to document the whole John Clark Ridpath thread in this Forum, just in case years from now, as we trade data with each other, we are trying to determine the true source, and someone actually updated their records based on something someone said here. Of course for me that means asking whoever is posting the data "What was your source?" and then of course, questioning that source until there is an original source of information that I might be able to gaze on.
One of the best examples of this is the assertion that James Ridpath (b. 1768) is the son of John Ridpath (b cir 1735 d 1777). The earlest original source I have come across that mentions James is either he (or someone with the same name) purchased land in 1786 in Abingdon, VA OR his marriage bond in Lexington, VA of 1792. Neither of these prove in any way that his father was the John Ridpath that died after the Battle of Germantown.
My hope is that the questions here are not "Who was so-and-so Ridpath's parents" but "How did you determine who so-and-so's parents are?"
Well, I've used up my 2 cents on the rigorous part, so I'll talk about my hope for a Full Ridpath/Redpath Genealogy. As many of you know, Roger W. Ridpath has put together absolutely the most comprehensive Ridpath genealogy in existence and it has been quite a labor that Roger shares readily with the rest of his cousins. Roger has generally limited his scope to American Ridpath's, most of them probably decendants of James Ridpath. I have tended to include Redpath's and all spelling variations from all over the world, mostly to truely track down some hard questions like when did John Ridpath immigrate and who where his parents/siblings. While there is not really a good tool/database/whatever yet for doing a full scale shared genealogical project, I try to keep in mind that the data I have spent so much time collecting will someday need to be passed on, and hopefully will be of a quality that the next user of the data will know where to go to verify this information. The task of sharing, merging, updating and resolving differences in the data will be made easier by me working on the quality of the records I put together today.
Followups:
|
| http://genforum.genealogy.com/ridpath/messages/10.html | ||
 |
Agreement of Use Link to GenForum Add Forum |
|