Mayflower misgivings 

Recently, while looking into the ancestry of a distant cousin, I noticed something wasn't quite right. I was researching among the renowned Mayflower "Silver Books" when it happened - or maybe I should say where it happened. I was attempting to establish a Mayflower connection for my new cousin Dan to MP John Howland. Dan is a Soap Opera and reality TV star who I'd found through a DNA match and whose father had been "switched at birth" as a baby - but that's a whole other story. Can you say Soap Opera? (But as usual, I digress.) 

Those of you who don't follow Mayflower lineage (and lineage society applications) should know that the "Silver Books" are generally considered the go-to sourcebooks for establishing any claim as a descendant of one of the Mayflower passengers. Generally speaking, the first five generations as outlined in those books are considered gospel, and usually "a given" when making an application to that particular lineage society. My problem was things just weren't adding up.

Now I understand that genealogy can be unwittingly fluid. It is as much an art as a science. (Think jig-saw puzzle missing both center and end pieces) True too, is that I was working on a difficult and previously unestablished line. Because of this, I needed to be very certain of all my facts if I was to have any hope of establishing a line from Mayflower passenger John Howland to Cousin Dan. I knew that I needed to go through each line of data to prove to myself that Dan's line was sound. This meant re-examining any statement about any part of his Mayflower line - even those in the Silver Books - to see if it matched up to original documents, and in the absence of those, if anecdotal ones held weight. What I found was that they didn't. What I found was some glaring mistakes and incongruencies on just the first two pages.

The line of descendants I've been intent on proving is for Mary Angel who married Jonathan Church, Jr.. and the records are slim. Since Mary's marriage to Jonathan isn't mentioned in this work, I've wanted to confirm everything else surrounding Mary Angel, like the fact that her father was William Angel, and her mother was Almy Harding, the daughter of Stephen Harding and Mercy Windsor as stated in the Silver Books. The trouble was, I couldn't. Everywhere I looked only proved to me that there was a "Stephen Harding who had married 'a' Mercy Windsor" almost a full generation before. It made me scratch my head. Did I have the right Stephen Harding and Mercy Windsor? Any genealogist knows it's an easy mistake to get the wrong couple with the right names - but a generation to two before? It didn't make any sense. After all, this is what the revered Silver Books were telling me was true. How could it not be so?               

So I wrote to the General Society of Mayflower Descendants, and, as politely as possible, I referenced the pages and the lineage in question and asked: "Can you tell me your source for the parents of Almy (Harding) who married William Angel?" This was the answer I received:

                        

Say what??? You don't know? You don't have a reference point or citation for what you are publishing as a fact? Come on folks!!! Now I know that this doesn't directly affect this particular Mayflower Howland line from Mary Angel to Cousin Dan, but one would think that if you don't know who her actual grandparents were you might not want to publish without citations that you did? Hello? Disclaimer anyone?

Given this, I decided to dig a little further into that particular page of the Silver Book. What I discovered was that the "body of facts" regarding the marriage of Mary Angel (and her husband therein called "Jonathan") was only noted as having "not been found." What was odd though, is that this "non-information about Mary's "non-marriage" to a Jonathan Comstock appeared to be constructed through faulty premises. What "information" there was in the Silver Book for her (and her alleged husband Jonathan) had been constructed around people who have been blended together - as if they were one and the same person.

It is my contention that the information about Mary Angel has been convoluted and borrowed from bad genealogies and again repeated in the Howland book. One of these faulty and convoluted "non-positions" is that the Mary Angel in question married Jonathan Comstock in the first place (and not her actual husband Jonathan Church, Jr.). 

I decided to take a look at this:                  

The bottom asterisked paragraph might be read as if the "Jonathan Comstock" mentioned here at Smithfield RI is the same person as the Jonathan Comstock at West Greenwich in both instances. A closer examination of the Angell Comstock genealogies reveals that the Silver Book author has done a poor job of clarifying two separate men. (Jonathan Comstock of Smithfield was deceased by 1784.) Given other errors in each of those genealogies about "Mary Angel" and "Jonathan Comstock" just who are we supposed to believe?

"I wasn't surprised by this. Years ago, Alica Crane Williams highlighted a potential error in the Hopkins Silver Book. While this error was acknowledged, it still appeared in the text of the lineage.

My question is: How can lay genealogists trust genealogical work presented as fact, especially when lineage societies use it to approve or deny applications? We know genealogy is often inaccurate and mistakes happen, but how can societies publish or rely on the information without clear and accessible citations or even acknowledged faulty ones? If something is unknown there is an obligation to publish with that caveat. Further, the average researcher shouldn't have to fork over a great deal of cash just to have someone read between "the lines" of any lineage society application.

Or, is the Mayflower "truth" only subject to how much someone wants to spend?

And yes, what about poor Dan?