Last week I uncovered several reputable researchers who have traced my Wilcox family line all the way back to England in the 1500s. In 1638, the first Wilcox arrived in what is now New England, just 18 years after the famous Mayflower. One hundred and fifty years later, the Wilcoxes joined other families in the major wave of Loyalist immigration to Upper Canada. They settled in the Niagara region in 1787, beating my Mennonite ancestors by over a decade. My five-times-great-grandfather Benjamin Wilcox Sr. was Overseer of Roads in Grimsby Township and also Town Warden, a job which included settling a dispute between two men over a hog in 1796.
You might think, wow, all that information found by others – just “cut and paste” into the family tree!
Not so fast.
I always do my own research, the painstaking process of checking “primary source material”. This includes official records of birth, death and marriage, war service, census information, town records; and contemporary records such as newspapers, family bibles and letters, when available (which they haven’t in my case.) Only when I’ve exhausted all the sources I can find online and in archives and museums, do I look at other family trees that other genealogists have published, in books, papers and reports or online, via such services as Ancestry.ca. The online services in particular have been a boon to genealogists the world over, promoting contact and sharing of far-flung branches of families. Sometimes I find exciting gems, like the picture above.
Sometimes I find problems. For example, all the online Wilcox family trees I found recorded my three-times-great-grandfather Hamilton Wilcox’s first born son as James Alexander Wilcox. In fact, Hamilton’s first born was James Benjamin Wilcox. I know this because I traced my grandmother’s line back to Hamilton Wilcox via primary source material.
James Alexander Wilcox was the son of Hamilton’s brother Daniel. Because he was born just two years after James Benjamin in the same township, and because census records show Hamilton’s son as simply “James”, it’s an easy mistake to make.
But a costly one, for those family historians content to copy other people’s research without verifying. And the picture above? I have yet to find the owner of the original, who can verify this is in fact Hamilton and Dorothea. The folks I’ve contacted so far have said no, they just copied the photo from other family trees.
Reputable researchers check primary source material and also cite their sources when they publish. I try to be a reputable researcher.
Beware the cut and paste.
So important! I have seen mistakes perpetuated in “history” books too, where it is clear the author is just copying what he/she has read in another secondary source.