Why I Dislike "Smart Matches"

My Heritage trees offer users "Smart Matches" when matching persons are found. It is designed to help improve or fill in gaps in your tree. A recent match for me yielded some additional information about my ancestor Martha Horn (d. abt. 1761). (I am not citing the specific tree it matched because I do not wish to call out the person who placed the information online.)

The tree owner provided a middle name for Martha in her tree. Martha was born before middle names were common. The person also provided the middle name of "Asbury" for Martha's husband. Since Francis Asbury was not born until after my ancestor William, this seems rather unlikely unless William's maternal grandfather, or possibly a great-grandparent, bore the surname "Asbury." However, men born during William's time only possessed a single given name. I definitely do not want to add either middle name to my tree without good documentation.

The next reason I do not like to add smart matches relates to place name information provided. The individual provided a birth date for Martha of 1719. (I lack a birth date, but it seems a likely date since the youngest known child was born about 1740. I need better documentation before I add a qualifier such as "abt" or "est" to the date.) However, the birthplace given is Bertie County, North Carolina, United States. The last time I checked my American history books, North Carolina was a colony at the time, the Revolution had not been fought, and the United States had not been birthed in 1719. Bertie County (or Precinct) was divided from Chowan in 1722, so even the birth location is incorrect. The tree owner also places "USA" at the end of the death date, which occurred before the birth of the United States.

The tree owner provides parents for Martha. I do not wish to add those until I establish the fact through my own research.

I want to be fully in control of the data entered on my tree, and "Smart Matches" do not provide that opportunity. The default is that all new or improved information is added. While I like the idea of connecting with others researching an individual through some sort of confirmation, I do not want to be forced to accept their data in order to do so. Until accepting data becomes optional, I simply peruse the smart matches for clues, avoiding acceptance of questionable data. Of course, my tree at My Heritage is simply skeletal for DNA matching purposes in the first place. I like being able to see matching trees Ancestry without being forced to accept their data. I always ignore the trees, but I can still see those ignored hints if I click on hints. With MyHeritage, I want to be able to consult the tree but the only options on the review page are to confirm the match or reject it. At least by not confirming or rejecting the matches, I can still view the matching trees by looking at the pending smart matches.

Scratching My Head

On Sunday afternoons between our morning and evening services at church, I frequently look through new Ancestry DNA matches for me and my dad up to about the 50% mark. I had an unusually large group of matches yesterday so I continued working on them after I returned home from the evening service until I had managed to get through them.

I always find a few things like a mother being born after her child was born, linkage to "parents" who are born in distant places with no connection to where the child was born and died, having children at under ten years of age, women giving birth at advanced ages, etc.

I love those tips about surnames that you and the match share. I clicked on one of those yesterday to discover that her ancestor sharing a same name as mine was allegedly married in Massachusetts in 1611 and allegedly had a child born in 1612 in Tewksbury, Essex, Massachusetts. I kept thinking that the date on Plymouth Rock is 1620. Since the person in question was born in England, I couldn't even assume the person was of native American origin. Of course, Tewksbury and Essex County didn't even exist as early as that tree alleged.

That, however, was not the biggest thing that made me scratch my head. The trees in question are actually not those of the person to whom I shared in this case but some I found as a result of that DNA match. I discovered that my DNA match and I shared the surname Stump. I knew that my Catherine Stump was born about 1711 in Pennsylvania, that she married Johannes Peter Keim in 1732, and that she died around 1768.  I had never tried to identify her parents. I didn't recognize this person's Stump line, but it did have ties to the Lancaster/Berks County areas so I just decided to see if anyone had identified the parents of my Catherine Stump. I found a couple of interesting things. Although she died in 1768, one person had her residing in Elk Lick, Somerset, Pennsylvania in 1840 with a link to the census for that year. She'd already been dead 71 or 72 years at that point. I didn't know that censuses enumerated ghosts. However, that one is not the one that took top honors in the unusual things category.

So what was the strangest thing I found? There were probably at least 20 trees that gave her death location as Chongqing, Chongqing Shiqu, Chongqing, China. As you might expect, there were no sources for the locations. One person had several citations for Stump, but the one thing that wasn't cited was the death. I'm trying to figure out why a woman from Pennsylvania would travel to China in the 18th century. (Her husband died in Pennsylvania in 1782.) It would have been a difficult voyage, and I just don't see it happening when she was married and had a family. Why have so many people apparently blindly accepted that she died there?  I thought that persons perhaps thought she might have been a missionary. The Wikipedia article shows that the mission movement to China began in the early part of the 19th century. However, it was mid-century before that took really began to explode. Lottie Moon, a name most Southern Baptists will recognize, didn't go to China until 1873. This does not seem like a likely reason for Catherine Stump to be there. I will not be adding this location to my own data. I may make a note that I've found undocumented trees that say she died there but that I have found nothing to support that conclusion. If anyone can provide documentation that she ever set foot in China, I'd love to see it.

Things That Make You Go Hmmm . . .

In the process of my efforts to make sure all my notes, photocopies, etc. are filed in a more easily retrievable manner, I began tackling a notebook that contained some of my earliest attempts in genealogy. This particular notebook contains information from at least three families that were connected with each other. I've not worked on one of the families in at least a dozen years (maybe even longer). As I am going through the materials, I'm trying to see what is in my database and what isn't, if it pertains directly, in an identifiable manner to my direct or collateral lines, and add it if necessary. For things that were attempts to crack the brick wall on this line, I'm going back to try to annotate some of the research so that I can see if I can make it a bit more meaningful to try to get past the brick wall, and typing it up (with footnotes) to get it in a more retrievable format. I've come across some interesting things.

I had handwritten notes on notebooks in 3 ring binders without reinforcements. I've discovered a page of notes with the bibliographic information missing on one of the items. What I do know about the source is that on pages 143-147 (at the very minimum) is a list of early marriages of Cumberland County, Kentucky. My notes indicate that the source stated that the county was formed in 1798 and included large parts of several counties, one of which was Wayne County. I also have a note that the list that follows was made by Mrs. Nora C. McGee before the courthouse fire of 1933. (I've summarized for you here, but I had the actual wording in my notes.) Then I included the marriages for two surnames that I was researching in Wayne County. Oh, how I wish I'd known then to make sure that the source information appeared on each page that I wrote by hand. I sent an e-mail to a couple of friends who do a great deal of research in Kentucky. I mentioned to them that I'd probably gotten it from the Public Library of Cincinnati & Hamilton County. I also mentioned that if they couldn't identify the source that I'd have to hope that either the McClung Collection or Tennessee State Library & Archives had it. One of them quickly replied that it was not one source and that it was probably another which was available at TSLA. To look at that source is now on my "to do" list for my October visit to TSLA.

Since I'm trying to identify the parents of Dicey Davis who married Charles Harris in Wayne County in 1811, I thought it might be helpful if I looked at some online family trees to see if any of them could shed some light on some of the marriages that I had collected. We all know how entertaining some of those trees can be, especially the undocumented ones. For example, I found the same marriage attributed to one husband who was said to have belonged to different sets of parents. I was attempting to locate a Marice Carter who married a Betsey Harris 10 Dec 1806 in Cumberland Co., Ky. I found a Morris Veale Carter, who married a Nancy Brown in 1813 in Nelson Co., Ky., whose parents were listed by one researcher as Edward Carter and Margaret Mason, but by most researchers (including ones with a greater degree of documentation) as Peter Carter and Amelia Veale. None of these trees identify an earlier marriage to a Betsey/Elizabeth Harris, but at least I have an annotation about it which might help in unpuzzling something in the future.

Then you have the cases of the underage marriages. Did an 18-year-old man marry a 10-11 year old girl as one tree seemed to indicate in the marriage of Robert Davis to Sally Smith in Lincoln County, Kentucky in 1796? The tree, which lacks documentation, states that Robert was born in 1778 and was the son of Robert Davis and Jane Jopling. It states that Sally was born in 1785/86 to Martin Smith and Hannah/Joannah Stephens. Do we have incorrect birth dates? Or is this a case of misidentifying the wife? Or did an 18 year old really marry and underage girl? Once again, I have an annotation with plenty of questions for further research attached to this one for further investigation.

I'm not a person who uses online family trees as a source for a final report. I'd much prefer to get as close to the original records as possible. These trees only provide clues for me. I want to see if I can build the families from the original records. I just need to know what other people are saying about the relationships and see if I come to the same conclusions from my own research. If there are disagreements between my conclusions and theirs, can I resolve the conflicts? This is a case where my annotated notes will prove more helpful than my genealogy software. I have not identified any of these families as my own, although they are in the same area as my families.