Bill's Genealogical Fun Facts #1

About 1 out of every 365 people will die on their borthdays. This could be said for almost anything like their anniversay, Christmas, the anniversay of their mother's death, etc.

Something to think about.

Bill

My Theory of Relativity

…Or, What is Relative When Talking About Relatives.

I am working on a series currently for DownsGenealogy.com on the ancestors of Thankful Doane Smith. She was the granddaughter of Rachel Doane, but Rachel’s parentage does not seem to be recorded anywhere. This has hounded researchers for quite some time. When searching indexes in journals and bulletin boards we often find the question posed, but never the answer.

I think I may have this mystery finally solved, but right now it is just a theory. My case for the solution is entirely circumstantial and not on very firm ground. But I have no contradictory or problem loose ends either. It’s neat, attractive, and any other solution I’ve held up next to it has quickly crumbled. I am currently looking for further evidence to support this theory and at the same time, trying to find disproof of it. Both items do not seem to be coming forward at this time.

My quandary is thus: at what point do I publish my theory? Do I publish it now? The advantages of publishing it are that others can help in proving, or disproving it. Maybe someone has been working on this problem and has more, or different, information than I do. Others can also share opinions or point out faults in my logic.

There is a considerable downside to publishing a theory. It is often taken as fact and used by others in there work. Often there is no notation that this is just someone else’s working theory. It is common to see it uploaded as part of family trees on sites like Ancestry.com or a similar place. As others find it, they incorporate into their own family trees they are working on and soon there are more cases on the web of the material as fact than the truth that it is just a possibility. What is a novice researcher to do in this situation? Does he believe the many, or does he listen to the one or two, if he even finds them, who are telling the truth?

So, do I publish my theory about my relatives, or not?

Want to Blow Your Mind?

I currently go back about 12 generations on Cape Cod through my grandmother Helen (Hopkins) Downs to my immigrant ancestors. Every time I go back a generation, there will be twice as many people in that generation than the previous one I researched. In the 12th generation back from me, there should be 4096 people. In all 12 generations combined there should be a total of 8187. I guess I’m lucky inasmuch that this all took place on the Cape where the population wasn’t large enough to support such a family tree. With much remarrying into families, my numbers are considerably smaller.

Going the other way can be even more cumbersome. In the previous instance, everyone has two, and only two, parents. But going forward, especially in earlier generations, there were usually a lot of kids. My great grandfather Thomas Downs had 6 sons. After this, things slowed down and each of those sons had on average 2 children. Thomas and Anna had 12 grandchildren. But in earlier centuries, a large family was the rule.

The Mayflower Society has published books containing the first five generations of many of the Mayflower passengers. A look at the total individuals covered in each of these books might give you an idea of how families grew rapidly back then. My ancestor, Stephen Hopkins, had 534 descendants after 5 generations. This includes his own generation of one, and goes up to his great great grandchildren. My ancestor Thomas Rogers on the other hand had only 308. Neither Stephen nor Thomas is even close to being in the running for having the most or the fewest. Poor John Billington only had 125, whereas John Howland had an even 500 through just his oldest child, daughter Desire Howland. John had 10 children so we can see that his progeny over the same five generations will be thousands when it is all finally tallied.

People often begin genealogical projects and define the scope of such projects without any consideration to these numbers. I recently read a statistic somewhere that one in ten Americans can trace their ancestry back to a Mayflower passenger. Suddenly, it is not such an exclusive club.

Across the Irish Sea?

In searching for my great grandfather’s family in England, I’ve been stymied. When he was a year old in England, his entire family shows up in the UK Census of 1861. After this they seem to vanish. We next find Thomas, according to his cable company contract, in Limerick, Ireland as an operator in 1874. He was only 14-15 years old. Three years later, in 1877, his older brother John, also a telegraph clerk was married while living in Limerick.

I must now consider a couple of possibilities. I doubt that Thomas and John were isolated from each other. They must have been living either together or at least in proximity. If I consider young Thomas at 14 or 15, then I’m sure he must have been living with his older brother. In 1874, when Thomas began working in Limerick as a cable operator, his older brother was 21.

We now have two scenarios to consider. Did a 15 year old Thomas go to live in Limerick Ireland along with his 21 year old brother? Or, did the entire Downs family move to Ireland after the 1861 census? The fact that the family disappears from census records after the 1861 census suggests that the latter is a possibility.

But one other thing strikes my about the names passed down in this family. Both John and Thomas were the sons of Thomas Downs. I believe, in turn, that he was the son of a John Downs, though I have yet to find more than circumstantial evidence for this. So Thomas Sr. named his oldest son (that we know of) after his own father and his name in the record is John William Downs. Thomas Sr. waited until his third son before he named one after himself, Thomas Jr. When Thomas Jr. came to America and started a family, he had six sons. He didn’t name one after himself and his father, Thomas. He didn’t name one after his brother Henry. With all this opportunity to name sons, there is only one named after a member of his family back home and that is my grandfather, John William Downs. He is obviously named after that older brother he fondly remembered who worked for the telegraph with him in Limerick Ireland. That tradition continued with my father, John William Downs and my older brother, John William Downs.

Cable Ties

In one of my past essays, What I Know about Thomas and Anna Downs: Part One, published on DownsGenealogy.com, I put forth some conjecture about this couple. One must be careful when writing conjecture in family history circles. Often what one feels may be true and deserves further research is repeated and published as fact later on by someone else. On the other hand, such thoughts when shared, often lead to others being inspired to look further and more concrete facts coming to light. This of course is always my hope when I venture into the realm of conjecture.

Since I penned that piece over a year ago, I have discovered much information concerning the origins of Thomas and Anna. Some of this evidence fits in with my theory or even expounds upon it. Other bits have caused me to revise my thinking. But either way, I thought I would put down my revised thoughts about things.

Let me start by giving a few pertinent facts as we now know them. Thomas Downs was hired as an operator on the French Transatlantic Cable from Brest France to Cape Cod. He was most likely already an experienced operator if they shipped him to America and built him a home in Eastham. Where did he get this experience?

The very first transatlantic cable went into operation in 1858, the year before Thomas was born. It ran from Ireland to Newfoundland. Thomas’s mother was from Newfoundland and he married a woman from Ireland. How did Thomas’s father meet his wife from Newfoundland? How did Thomas meet his wife from Ireland? I have recently uncovered the fact that Anna came to this country 4 years after Thomas took the job on the Cape. She married him in Boston the same day she disembarked the ship at that port. It seems to me that Thomas had already fallen in love with this girl from Ireland before he took the job in Eastham, but where?

I have wondered if Thomas’s father had been involved with telegraphy or the cable. Maybe this is how he met his wife from Newfoundland. One of the new facts that I have uncovered recently is that the Downs family in England was living in the Greenwich vicinity just prior to Thomas’s birth. Greenwich is where the first transatlantic cable was manufactured and tested prior to being loaded on the ships to be laid. Could the Downs family have something to do with this project? The time it was completed seems to correspond to when the Downs family moved to Chelsea in the Greater London area. In the 1861 UK census Thomas Senior appears to not be working and receiving a pension.
This is all just conjecture, but I find that there are so many time and place coincidences between the Downs family and the first transatlantic cable. There were plenty of shorter telegraph lines that could have also brought people together in Canada, Ireland and England. Could a single telegraph cable tie our family together? Could it be several smaller cables? Hopefully, some day we’ll know.

What is Proof?

Do we as genealogists ever really prove anything? If I were asked, ‘Who are your parents,’ I could answer this without even thinking. But if I was then asked to prove it, what would my answer be?

If any of us were put in that position, our first thoughts would be of our birth certificate, but does this really prove anything? I have seen countless vital records with errors and even heard of cases in which records were forged. Is a birth certificate really proof of parentage? How do we know that mother didn’t have an affair and someone else is the father? At this point in the questioning, most of us would become flustered and end the discussion with “I just know it is true… I know so in my heart.”

That I know truly in my heart who my parents are, is enough for me, as it should be for all of us. But if I can cast doubt today with our laws and records as they are, do we as genealogists really ever prove anything? I submit the question, “What is proof?”

I know that today we have DNA as a tool, but the vast majority of what we do does not rely on this most modern of technology. We deal with family bibles filled in by individuals who had an interest in exactly what information would be passed on. Often these bibles are filled in with many generations past from other bibles or even just plain memory. Church records are probably better since they were usually recorded by a disinterested third party, but often they only had the word of the family member reporting the information. I have many times come across the baptisms or births of several children recorded at one time. How do we know that they were all truly children of this family? Could the oldest have been homeless and unofficially adopted? Could you see them hiding this fact from everyone, even the child itself? Again I ask, “What is proof?”

I don’t think genealogists prove anything, and maybe we need to remind ourselves of this fact. We gather all of the evidence available and then we give our opinion based on it. Most often, we find few if any who would argue with our findings, and we usually consider something proven at this point. But when new evidence comes to light showing that something different probably occurred, we often refuse to believe it. We ignore it because the subject has already been settled and proved differently. How could this new view be true?

We need to remind ourselves that the first finding was an opinion based on the evidence available at the time. It was an opinion, not a fact. If new evidence has surfaced, maybe we need to change our original opinion.
Again I ask, “What is proof?”

The Book of Numbers

Something has been brought to my attention a couple of times in the past two months. It appears that my numbering system for uniquely identifying individuals in my genealogy is unconventional. In my database of people I have assigned a number in the order in which I have entered them into the database. For example, I started with my family as a child. My father is #1, my mother is #2, I am #3, etc.

The reason I use the numbers on my web site, Downs Genealogy.com, is to help avoid confusion. This sample should prove my point:

My great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was Joshua Hopkins{#97}, who was born in 1657. I am descended from him through his son, Joshua Hopkins{#95}, born in 1698. Among his sons was my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, Joshua Hopkins{#93}, born in 1725. This Joshua{#93} had a son, Joshua Hopkins{#91}, born in 1753. Joshua{#91} had eight children. Two of his sons were Joshua{#838}, born in 1787, and Giles{#89}, born in 1791. Giles Hopkins{#89} was my great-great-great-grandfather.

So this is my numbering system as it stands today. It is simple and it works for my needs. The problem seems to be that genealogists have become used to certain numbering systems when they read the material published by someone else. Two examples are “Register Style” and NGSQ. But these systems are designed for genealogies starting with a single progenitor and working forward. My research does a lot of working back, so this type of a system would not work.

I could use the Ahnentafel system which is quite neat. If you want to know who someone’s father is, just double their number. However, only parents are given a number and siblings are left out. This makes collateral lines, and multiple descents from a single individual, a nightmare for both the compiler and the reader.

I guess the real issue is if we consider my web site a final published product. If you look at a publication like the Mayflower Society’s Five Generation Project, you notice that it is set up so that the numbering system helps you navigate through the book, up and down generations. They use the Register System of numbering, but why does a system like that work for them while leaving me stymied?

The answer is that my web site is always a work in progress. One of the last steps in publishing a genealogy is assigning the numbers. It has become a finished product without need of change. When corrections need to be made in future editions, often the numbering has to be modified. In the Five Generation Project, we see this when a child needs to be added to a family. We’ll say the children in a family were originally #236, #237 and #238, and a new child has just been discovered who was born between #237 and #238. In order to make a correction in a subsequent a printing or edition, the numbering system has to be adjusted something like this: #236, #237, #237a and #238. The only other solution would be to renumber the entire publication, which would be confusing when referring to it in source citations, research and such.

It would be the same for me when I add people to the database or the web site. I would need to renumber everyone each time I expanded, which would cause more confusion. If someone printed a page of my research, filed it away and then wanted to check back a year later, he would assume that the numbers still had meaning. I think you see what I am trying to explain, so I’ll stop here.

Even though my site is a published work, it can’t be considered finished since I am constantly updating. It is for these reasons that a standard genealogical numbering system can’t be employed. Perhaps someday, if I publish a book, I will be able to use a better numbering system.

"None of us really understands what's going on with all these numbers."

Congressman David A. Stockman
On the US Budget, 1981

Bill Downs
DownsGenealogy.com