Bad Genealogy!
This page deals with
misleading and untruthful Gilchrist family trees which you will
find all-too-easily online. If you have been confused by
something you've read about the origins of our Gilchrist line, you
may find the explanation here.
If you wish to skip directly
to what is factually known about our ancestors, click here;
to the brother of my g-g-grandfather who emigrated with his family
to Australia, click here;
to the branch of our family tree with the surname Fraser
(descendants of the eldest sister of my g-g-grandfather), click here;
and for the brother who stayed in Glasgow, click here.
You'll also learn about a third brother that we lost all track of
once he had joined the Lanarkshire Rifles; I'm hoping to learn
where records of that unit may still exist.
So let's
begin: with great apologies to those who take offense at my
scolding tone, I am compelled nevertheless to
describe known
Scottish ancestors, and to refute several family trees
which purport to trace the lineage of my ancestors but which come
up short of proof in the form of original documentation. I will
demonstrate how those that I refute are erroneous.
Most of the errors
I've spotted appear to originate with an internet software
application called OneWorldTree, which disclaims right up front
that it makes no pretense at being accurate, but several
conflicting false connections have been taken as facts and
replicated across a number of trees on Ancestry.com, and who knows
where else. The advent of the digital universe is a
double-edged sword...I recently managed to have one of these trees
taken down from RootsWeb when the email address of the person who
posted it proved to be a dead link, after discovering that some
descendants have unwittingly replicated the misinformation on it.
If anyone has any genuine
documentary evidence of linkages that I have discounted, I will be
happy to incorporate them and change my tree. It is
important, when constructing an accurate family tree, to
distinguish between what is proven and what is merely speculative,
and when one has no documentary proof of a connection, one does
not engage in the fictitious practice that a more scrupulous
researcher friend of mine calls "stitching together names".
OneWorldTree actually declares right up front that that's exactly
what they set out to do! Their purpose appears to be to
provide possible leads for further research, but they've created
an unholy mess of false information on the internet, as people
researching their own trees have taken these "possibilities" and
reposted them as facts on their own published trees...and the
errors then get replicated by others hungry for family history.
Family history, passed on as
it will be from one well-meaning generation to the naive and
unwitting next, should be the factual truth, without conjecture,
romance or fanciful speculation allowed to creep in. I'm
reminded of a Canadian comedian Mike Myers, who used to play a
role based on the personality of his Scottish grandfather; he
would trumpet, with thunderous conviction, "If it's no' Scottish,
it's cr-r-rap!" In the case of family trees, my conviction
is similar: "If it's not truthful, it's..."
My own research included a
detailed report from a professional member of the Scots Ancestry Research Society in
1974, a day in 2001 spent looking at microfiche with Robert
McLeish in Lesmahagow, and a week after that following up leads in
area towns in libraries, cemeteries and town hall registeries
looking for actual entries in census records, births, banns of
marriage, wedding and burial records written within the past two
centuries. I followed that with a decade of sharing information
(mostly on the receiving end) with a local on-site researcher and
possible distant cousin, who has fed me the same kind of
documentary proof of everything we have agreed to believe.
To directly refute some of
the "trees" we have seen of my lineage on the internet:
Our known lineage starts with the
Thomas Gilchrist whose gravestone is pictured on the Lesmahagow
page, who had been a custom weaver according to his son William's
death certificate, and who was married to a Margaret Bunton,
mother of William Gilchrist, just before the turn of the 19th
century; and the sole two pieces of
evidence that anyone has to be certain of this are his
gravestone and the death certificate. It is important to
note that as far as we know, no recorded birthdate exists for
him (certainly not 18 Mar 1748, although I wish that it were
so), and no
recorded parentage; and the gravestone is unequivocal
about the fact that he died in December, not in August.
There
is not, and has never been, to our knowledge, any person recorded
as having the dual surname "Gilkerson Gilchrist".
There is
no town called Lesmahagow in "Yorkshire, England".
There is
no evidence
in existence that our Thomas Gilchrist married three wives in
succession, all named Margaret.
There was a Thomas who married Margaret
Brown, daughter of James and Janet Brown, on August 9th, 1771, in
Auchenbegg, a hamlet within the parish of Lesmahagow; but he was not our
ancestor. I am told by my reliable
on-site researcher friend that this family moved to Stonehouse
Parish (she knows a living descendant of this line), where
there was a large and very successful weaving industry. She
tells me that this Thomas Gilchrist was a "Carter" (by occupation,
not surname); our ancestor was a custom weaver. They named
their children some names that run in our family line, even in the
same birth order (adjusted for gender sequence) as William named
his children: he had a son
named John, his third child was named James (1775-1851; a "master
tailor"), and his fourth was Janet (b.1777). There may have been a
daughter Margaret, possibly the missing second child, who was
listed as being married to James Cadzow in Threepwood in the 1821
census. However, this Thomas' last child was
born twenty years before William was, and it seems likely that
Margaret Brown would have been past her child-bearing years by
1797. Because of the names, it's very tempting to posit a
link: could Thomas have been married to her, become a custom
weaver (pretty unlikely!), and remarried a Margaret Bunton after
that? Who knows...that's merely a weak hypothesis, not
tested or supported by any documentation - and really, there's no
record of anyone in our family ever living in or being born in
Stonehouse Parish, or buried there (but we do have
that sort of proof for Lesmahagow Parish), so we cannot simply
choose to say
that this man was
William's father and enter him as such on a family tree. I
could wishfully believe that this is so, but the evidence is contrary to
that connection.
Margaret Brown was not also called Janet; there was
apparently a completely different Thomas Gilkerson who married a
Janet Brown. Brown was a very common surname in
Lanarkshire in those days. Consider that there were also a
lot of Gilkersons, with quite a limited selection of favourite
Christian names among them which were repeated from generation to
generation according to traditional Scottish naming practices, so
there may have been quite a few Thomas Gilkersons. At the
turn of the century there were over three thousand people in the
parish, many of them extended family and cousins to each other at
one degree or another; two-thirds of the populace were
agricultural workers, but there were 62 weavers and 40 masons, and
trades tended to run in families as well.
Our Thomas Gilchrist was also not the
one who married a Margaret Weir on December 5th, 1785. I have a report from the Scots Ancestry Research Society that
Dad ordered back in 1974 from Patricia Baxendine. It might
have been a source for misinformation, if read as implying a
line of descent, but she doesn't actually claim that - she
appears to be simply supplying all the records she can find that
might pertain. It is five pages of
census and parochial registry entries, mainly all the same entries I saw on Robert McLeish's microfiche.
Reading her report, one could posit Thomas Gilkerson and
Margaret Weir as possible parents for William, but there's no
logical reason to do that. They were stated as having
children named Robert, Thomas and Margaret between 1788 and
1794, but no William in 1797 or in any other year, and no James
at all that I'm aware of. I mention James, because someone
has posited that William might have grown up in his household
upon the death of his mother, as a speculative explanation for
Margaret Bunton being listed as William's mother on his death
certificate. However, the
record shows that James Gilkerson married Margaret Buntin in
1799, and any James born to
Thomas Gilkerson and Margaret Weir could only have been 14 years
old, at the most, in 1799, so that isn't really a credible
suggestion. And although Margaret Bunton is listed as
William's mother, it is still a Thomas who is listed as his
father, not a James.
On the Old Parish Registry
#649/1 there is a Thomas born to Cathrine Millar (with a C, not
a K) and John Gilchristson on March 12th or 18th (looks like the
former, but the latter is suggested because of the sequence of
dates before and after; however, the dates of entry weren't
terribly regular), in 1749. (Microfilm 1066597 in drawer
85C in the LDS centre at Salt Lake City.) He'd be 67 in
December 1816, so perhaps he's the Thomas Gilkerson in the
Burial Registry. There's no proof to connect this man to
our lineage, and the Christian names don't match William's
choices. Although William and Isabel named their first son
John, they had no daughter named Catherine. (In connection with this, see the
italicized paragraph on John Gilkerson and Katharine Millar, on
the Lesmahagow page.)
Our William's first daughter was named Janet Hill Gilchrist
according to her descendants, and indeed, we know from his wife Isabella Sharp's
death certificate that Janet Hill was the maiden name of her
mother, i.e. Janet Hill Gilchrist's maternal grandmother.
The next daughter Margaret would likely have been named after her
paternal grandmother, Margaret Bunton. (I don't know why the maternal one came first,
however - I thought it was more common to pass on the paternal
grandparent names first and then the maternal ones.) There
is a speculative possibility, just in case someone stumbles over a
record of a Thomas Gilkerson married to a Margaret Bunton, that
this Thomas Gilkerson could be our ancestor, for the reason which
I refer to as the "cemetery anomaly", on the Lesmahagow page.
As to even more highly
speculative links to the earlier James and John Gilkerson, I'll
simply record those as an aside, much farther on. The evidence,
when examined objectively, suggests that these links are not ours
either, despite the natural desire to make the tree extend back as
far as possible.