Happy Festivus! Now for the airing of grievances.
Who let the genealogists take over Wikipedia?
Genealogists editing Wikipedia. I’ve got a lot of problems with you people. But for now you’re just going to hear about two.
FIRST: celebrities, luminaries, figures of minor note. Your Wikipedia pages are way too long. Your entries are padded. Deep family history is great. I love it. But 90% of the time, its fluff. In the “Early Life” section of such cultural touchstones as Ron DeSantis and Beyoncé, we learn not only what high school they attended, but also their ethnic background, names of great-grandparents, the names of distant ancestors who do not themselves merit a Wikipedia page (in Beyoncé’s case), and the name of the ship on which your ancestors crossed the Atlantic (in DeSantis’s). We learn that the poet Dana Gioia’s great-grandfather was shot by a “disgruntled and racist cowboy” before we learn his birthdate.
None of that stuff is terribly important. But the worst offender by far is the genealogist’s special—notable ancestors. Yes, it’s kind of funny that Hugh Hefner was descended from William Bradford. But it’s totally unsurprising and has absolutely nothing to do with Hugh Hefner. And yes, it’s interesting that Barack Obama is descended from John Punch, potentially the “first official slave” in the English Colonies, but it’s totally irrelevant to the president’s life story. Don’t get me started on Punch’s absurdly long “Descendants” section.
You’d think I’d be the last person to complain. But this is totally ridiculous. This is the genealogical fallacy in action. One’s distant ancestors, except in rare cases, tell us almost nothing about a modern-day person. Or at least nothing worth casually knowing.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t research celebrity genealogies. It’s fun. Go to town! But just because you worked really hard to figure out that Lana del Rey’s ancestors came from Lanarkshire doesn’t make it important information. But that’s just the problem. When you put that stuff on Wikipedia (if you’re the 3% of users who do 97% of the editing), you’re teaching the rest of the internet (i.e., the world) that it is important. It’s interesting (I guess) that Ron DeSantis’s paternal great-great grandfather Salvatore Storti immigrated to the U.S. in 1904. It’s not important, and it tell us basically nothing about Ron DeSantis. But it’s in Wikipedia, so I guess we’re supposed to think it’s some crucial info.1
It takes us right back to the bad old days of genealogy, when the primary purpose was to glorify the descendant, to show how he deserves his wealth, his position, his power. We have gone so far in the other direction that we’re almost back where we started.
SECOND: Stop making wikipedia bios for your nobody ancestors.2
Moses Simonson was a religious “separatist,”—what we now call a Pilgrim—who immigrated to Plymouth Colony aboard the ship “Fortune” in 1621. That’s the second pilgrim ship after the “Mayflower.” Then he lived and farmed in Duxbury for many years. Then he died. He has many descendants.
That’s it. As wonderful or horrible a man as he may have been, there’s not much else to say about him in 2022. And yet: click here for Moses Simonson.
This is an article only a genealogist could love. It’s got it all: immigration date, land transactions, tax lists, children’s names, notable descendants, and of course, the piece de resistance, an utterly unsubstantiated claim of Jewish ancestry.3
Wikipedia is full of these ancestral biographies. Of course we family historians love our immigrant ancestors and they’re all very special to us. But I very much doubt they pass Wikipedia’s notability bar. These are people notable solely because they had a lot of descendants. And some of those descendants are internet genealogists.
Some other examples:
It’s a dead giveaway when the family/descendants/legacy section is as long or longer than the biography.
Stop making Wikipedia pages for your ancestors. Put it on Wikitree. Write a book! Stop crying and fight your father!
Listen, I understand why it’s really there. It’s so-called “Resistance genealogy,” where showing that an anti-immigration hardliner’s ancestors were (gasp) immigrants and (deeper gasp) potentially even “illegal” is supposed to strike a blow to their credibility and maybe even change their minds. I haven’t been keeping up with politics lately: is it working?
I’m being mean for effect. You know and I know that I love the nobodies.
We’ve been through this before. Neither the first name Moses nor the last name Simonson, nor the two of them in concert, is anything close to prima facie evidence of Jewish background. All of these Calvinists liked a good Old Testament name, whether in English, Dutch, French, or German. I don’t blame the 19th century folks for not knowing this. But we should know better. You can search for the first name Moses in the Netherlands around the year 1600 and get more than 35,000 hits. Or try the patronymic surname “Simons” and get more than 50,000.