The Internet Genealogist's Lament
With a bonus learned discursus on the Hales of Watton-at-Stone, Herts. I know that's what you're here for.
I.
Genealogy is at root (ha) a constellation of factual assertions. If you’re sticking to the basics (kid-mother-father-kid-mother-father), the constellation sort of looks like a tree. Arbor Minor, let’s call it. But add siblings, cousins, in-laws, and collateral lines as far as they’ll go, and it starts to look more like the night sky itself.
What are those factual assertions? Names, dates, places. Biographical detail.
Imagine for yourself the perfect, complete family tree. Every one of your ancestors named, dated, and placed back to the dawn of human language. Behold! the grand sweep of human migration as represented by the pointillistic biographical facts of your own ancestors. Imagine knowing the name of the very first person in your family tree to have a name. I suspect you would find each of them was your ancestor many millions of times over. Then think of how, still, you have access to a mere fraction of the total human experience—unknowable exactly how small—because only a subset of the humans who have ever existed have descendants living today.
Now picture your actual family tree, as you’ve puzzled it out. It’s like the night sky on a mostly cloudy evening. You’ve got some beautiful stars up there. But the heavens are heavily obscured. And, sad to say, they always will be.
But at least you know the stars are in the right place! You’re a serious person. You triple-check your dates, you correct typos, you review primary sources. You don’t connect a parent and child just because they have the same last name and lived in the same county. More people should be like you.
But most people are not. And can you blame them? If they’ve managed to trace any branch of their family back to the 1600s, they’ve likely got hundreds if not thousands of paper ancestors. You have a job! You have descendants (a/k/a kids)! Who has time to triple-check the birth dates of thousands of dead people?1
So what I’m about to show you is understandable. And to understand is to forgive. But it’s still so, so crappy.
II.
Look at this guy. This is not a real guy. This guy never existed.
Not to pick on the typist behind “Johnson Allswede,” who has undertaken the herculean task of maintaining the biographical details of 215,442 people. Nearly 21,000 other family trees say the same, or close enough to it. And there are 21 “sources!” What could go wrong?
This Thomas Hale is approximating a real Thomas Hale, but doing so very badly. It’s like the pod people version. The real Thomas Hale is one of my ancestors. He may be yours, too. Someday he may be everyone’s. The real Thomas Hale never left England, but his son, another Thomas Hale, immigrated to Newbury, Massachusetts Bay Colony sometime before 1638. Joan Kirby was really his wife, and he really lived in Watton-at-Stone, a village in Hertfordshire in a region afire with Puritan sympathies. But everything else is wrong:
There is no record of his baptism in Watton. Indeed, no one has yet discovered his place of birth.
He could not have been married in Little Munden in 1637 because in 1637 he was very busy being dead. The parish registers of Little Munden also do not survive before 1680.
He did not die in 1634, but in 1630. The Watton parish registers show he was buried 19 October 1630, his will is dated 11 October 1630 and it was proved 9 December 1630.
His father was not “Sir William Hawley.” You should be immediately suspicious of (a) the sudden name change; and especially (b) the sudden shift in social status. Of course, you would need to know Thomas Hale’s social status (a yeoman)2
His mother was not Rose Bond. Though Rose Bond was the wife of a real William Hale (not Hawley! and not Sir!) of King’s Walden, Hertfordshire.
Each of these errors has its own genealogy, if you want to get real meta with it. But the principal problem is that we’re dealing with that all-too-common internet native, the genealogical chimera. These chimeras are born every time internet genealogists (a/k/a "data entry specialists")3 play a game of telephone, often commenced IRL almost two hundred years ago. In this case, I have a feeling this chimera's last stop before Ancestry was an LDS Ancestral File.4
There's also a "fact buffet" effect. You copy "Thomas Hale the Elder" from one tree, pop in his birth date. Then later you see a marriage date in another tree. Sure, we'll take one of those. Then comes the death date from yet another online tree. And for dessert? Don't mind if I do add those parents. Sometimes if you're not paying attention, you might pull a double set of parents. Very often you end up attaching multiple spouses, usually with impossibly overlapping tenures (these folks frowned on polygamy).
In this case, as in every case, let’s start from the beginning. Not from the man, but from the myth, the legend. The man was doing just fine for himself, requisciating in pace and all, until roughly 1845, when the antiquaries got ahold of him.
Joshua Coffin’s great History of Newbury says this about the immigrant Thomas Hale (not the father, yet undisturbed):
HALE, THOMAS, glover, with his wife Tamosin alias Thomasine, came to Newbury in 1635. He d. 21 Dec. 1682, aged 78.
You can find him in town records readily enough, and he is indeed a glover. A glover made and/or sold gloves, but I guess you knew that. Thomas the immigrant’s death is recorded in the town book. But as to the immigration date and age at death—I’m not sure where those came from. Coffin had the benefit of speaking to Thomas and Thomasine’s aged great-great grandchildren. Perhaps they related a family tradition. Family tradition is often the font of mythology. Based on the above, the man was born roughly in 1604 and came to New England in 1635 at about age 31.
But in describing the immigrant’s origins, Coffin goes awry:
The family of Hale is of considerable antiquity in England and of high respectability in England. Thomas Hale, of Codicote, in Hertfordshire, married Anne, daughter of Edmund Mitchell, and had three sons, Richard, William, and John. Richard, the eldest son, purchased the estate of King’s Walden in Hertfordshire, and died in 1620. His son William succeeded him, and died in August 1634, aged sixty-six. He left nine children . . . [including] Thomas, 1606. The last mentioned Thomas is supposed to be the Thomas Hale who came to Newbury.
There’s your trouble. The real Thomas was indeed from Hertfordshire, as we’ll see, and very close to King’s Walden, so again there was very likely a family tradition there. Somebody in 1845 knew or believed he came from Hertfordshire. Then some Victorian happened upon the King’s Walden family and saw they were of considerable antiquity and high respectability, and how are you supposed to resist that? That must be my family! Coffin’s “supposed to be” does a lot of work here, as even writing in 1845 before the advent of scientific genealogy he seems to know proof is lacking.
So let's not be too hard on Coffin.5
Enter Robert Safford Hale, lawyer and genealogist. In 1877, he wrote:
No sufficient proof is found to establish conclusively the identity of Thomas of Newbury with this Thomas of King's Walden, though facts are known to make such identity probable. The question is still under investigation and the English origin of Thomas of Newbury may become the subject of a future paper.
Four short years later he was able to make good on that. Publishing in the New England Historic & Genealogical Register, he presented the findings of the truly excellent American genealogist Col. Joseph Lemuel Chester. Chester’s research artfully squashes any hope that Thomas of Newbury came from the highly respectable King’s Walden Hales:
This Thomas doubtless died childless in the life-time of his father, not being named in the will of the latter, dated in 1634 and proved in 1634. The records of King’s Walden show nothing of him after his baptism.
Nineteenth century genealogists loved saying things were “doubtless.” I actually wouldn’t agree, at least based on the will and parish register alone. Just because a son isn’t named in his father’s will doesn’t mean he’s dead. The father could have provided for his son Thomas in some other way. And young Thomas could have easily moved away from King’s Walden, explaining his absence from the parish registers.
Where was I? Robert Safford Hale points out that the earliest date at which we can positively place Thomas in New England is 1638. And aside from unsourced Coffin, there’s no reason to believe Thomas actually immigrated in 1635. That spurious immigration date was causing people to overlook another piece of evidence, namely, the letters of Governor John Winthrop. One in particular, dated 10 May 1637, came from Winthrop’s friend and relation Francis Kirby.6 In that letter, Kirby sweetly requested that Winthrop look out for his "neer kinsman" Thomas Hale, who had just brought his family across the ocean (and brought the letter from Kirby with him). Winthrop presumably directed Hale to Newbury, and that's where he settled.
Now we’re in business! Following up on that clue, Chester found the 1634 will of Thomas Hale of Watton-at-Stone (i.e., “the elder”), the father of the immigrant. In the will, Hale named his brother Francis Kirby as overseer and also named a son Thomas. Lo and behold, the records of Watton-at-Stone produce a Thomas Hale, baptized to Thomas and Joane Hale, on 15 June 1606. Chester also found the baptismal records for two of Thomas and Thomasine's children, both in Watton-at-Stone. The names of the immigrant, his wife, and eldest two children all match up. Q.E.D.
Mind you this was published in 1881. Chester A. Arthur was president. Poor President Garfield had just died at his Jersey Shore cottage, wincing and grimacing at the Atlantic. Had he been shot fifteen years later he might have survived. But in 1881 his trusted physicians plunged their unwashed hands directly into his torso in search of the offending bullet.
III.
141 years have passed. A few things have happened. But even as the generations are born and die, the King’s Walden theory, even in its unopposed heyday never more than a supposition, lives on.
This is upsetting to me. Would we be so sanguine if doctors were still inadvertently sending their patients into septic shock? No! We sue them for medical malpractice. Genealogy is fundamentally different from medicine in so many ways. First of all, it’s not very important. Medicine is important. Let’s just get that out of the way. I’d rather one doctor know the work of Joseph Lister than one million genealogists know Robert Safford Hale. But there are similarities, too. Even as methods and sources have democratized, they remain disciplines for the trained elect. You don’t need to know organic chemistry to be a good genealogist. But you can’t just blunder into it either.
Back to “Thomas the Elder” Hale for a moment. Not the real guy, but the genealogical chimera.
Let’s go in order. The exact date of birth—11 May—I have no idea where that came from. It’s possibly a baptismal date for one of the King’s Walden Hales copied over. The 1575 probably comes from a responsible estimate of the real Thomas Hale’s birth year. He married in 1601, evidently for the first time. 26 was around the average age of first marriage for a man at that time and place. The date of marriage is nonsense on its face. But “Little Munden” is there because its Joan Kirby’s home village. The death date is another mini-chimera. The real Thomas Hale was buried 19 October 1630 in Watton-at-Stone. And 1634 is the death year of the real William Hale of King’s Walden, the father of the Thomas Hale who probably died before his father made his will. Then, the cherry on top, we have the wife (Joan Kirby) of the real Thomas of Watton-at-Stone, but the parents (William Hale and Rose Bond) of another Thomas Hale (bp. 1606, so actually a generation removed) who probably died before 1634. And even if he lived, is certainly not the immigrant Thomas Hale. Are you following this? It’s OK if not. The point is that the two families have been fused—thrown into the blender and homogenized. The man shown above (in 21,000 trees and counting) never existed. He was constructed. Not out of whole cloth, but, like Frankenstein’s monster, out of bits of other dead people. Plug in the router, throw the switch. It’s ALIVE.
This happens all the time. I picked Thomas Hale because I know the family well. But insert your ancestor here, the older the better.
My friends, if we’re going to do genealogy at all, let’s at least do it right.
A few simple rules:
Enter every date yourself. Do they make sense?
Enter every location yourself. Do they make sense? Was your English ancestor born in Massachusetts before the Mayflower? Was your foremother born in Cairo, Illinois but married in Cairo, Egypt? Was Elvis’s great-great grandmother born in Lithuania?
Pay attention to baptisms vs. births; marriages vs. banns; deaths vs. burials vs. will writings vs. will probate. Listen: I know. Who cares? But if you’re going to do it at all, do it right.
Never, never, never merge someone else’s tree with yours. Would you buy a house sight unseen? Don’t be lazy. Do the work.
Finally, if you keep your tree off the internet and out of reach of frantic copy-pasters? Do whatever the hell you want.
IV.
Back to that night sky.
That’s the one.
It’s OK that your night will always be cloudy. It’s OK if your whole life long you discover only a few genuinely new stars. But those are your stars and you found them. Their glory was obscured and through your diligence and ingenuity they are again brilliantly evident. Those are real people who once lived, laughed, wept, died, and then were consigned to oblivion. You pulled them out. One such rescue is worth a million knights, viscounts, and potentates. Don’t get distracted by the bright lights.
We are, all of us, both of these people, right? I find an error in my own work pretty much every time I look. I’m still fixing things I messed up when I was 13 years old. But with almost 100,000 people in my Family Tree Maker file (the nonsensical filename of which is unchanged since I was 12), how could it be otherwise?
That’s a kind of upper-middle status farmer, between a husbandman and a gentleman. Immigration to Massachusetts was largely made up of these middling sorts, in stark contrast to the southern colonies, which was a scattering of higher status gentlemen and a whole lot of labourers.
No more shade implied than the minimum necessary. Again, I’ve been this person. Most of us have.
One wonders if this reconstituted pseudo-Elizabethan was posthumously [sic] baptised.
Aside from being a pioneering antiquarian and teacher of the poet John Greenleaf Whittier, he co-founded the New England Anti-Slavery Society. What have you done lately?
Kirby was married to Winthrop’s sister’s husband’s sister. Simple, really.