Trusting the Trailblazer

 

While those of us who chase our family's history may pride ourselves on our independent research, the truth of the matter is that none of us could do this detective work without the help of others. One way or another, we need a trailblazer to point the way. The key, however, is to ensure that that trailblazer is worthy of our trust.

There is a phrase which made its appearance toward the end of the Cold War years which I have since co-opted for my own less-political purposes: "Trust, but verify." What inspired me to adapt that motto for genealogy was the frustrating discovery that some information provided on death certificates might not necessarily be correct—details like mother's maiden name, for instance. Not that anyone was deliberately seeking to deceive future generations; it's just that the moments immediately following the death of a loved one can be some of the most high-stress times in a person's life. Thus, we receive incorrect information that once got blurted out by those who should know, then duly recorded by government officials who are only doing their job, but otherwise would have no way of knowing.

My father-in-law's family led me to yet another example of "documentation" which might not be trustworthy: his great-grandfather's grave marker, which clearly spells the patrilineal surname as "Steavens." Since discovering multiple instances such as these, I've learned to be far more willing, in looking at family history resources of any kind, to trust—but verify.

Thus it is when we turn to those published genealogies of the early years of a previous century. Though research trailblazers may have written their findings closer to the time of our ancestors, these books were compiled without the technological aids we've come to take for granted. No matter how well-meaning the researcher, we have to accept it as a given that there will be mistakes. But should we toss out the books as worthless for our purposes? Absolutely not; we take them and double-check the work done a hundred years ago with the tools we have now to bring up digitized documents for verification. Thus, we trust, but verify.

In researching my January project for those Twelve Most Wanted I slated for 2024—the paternal line of my fourth great-grandmother Margaret Chew Carter—I've found mentions that she was descended from a man known as King Carter. We've already discussed one example from a book published in 1911, but I later found that same information repeated in a different book from 1926. The problem is that many of the genealogy books of the previous century were not as stringent about providing their sources; the latter book might only have been repeating what the author read from the previous one, without personally verifying the information. The reader has no way to know—only to verify that detail independently.

Based on what I've learned from the minimal research done this past week, I already have warning bells going off in my head when I read an entry like this:

This section of the 1916 book, The Kinnears and Their Kin, details a Carter line from John Carter, presumably the founding immigrant, through to the children of Margaret Chew Carter and her husband Zachariah Taliaferro. Yet, based on a quick search online, it becomes obvious that the author's designation for the person known as King Carter was incorrect. How many times has this information been repeated?

While that may be discouraging to realize, I have run across some positive signs. I mentioned the other day that I had run Margaret Chew Carter's name through a Google search. Among other hits, I ran across this entry at JSTOR from an October 1910 article in The William and Mary Quarterly. (If you don't have access to that service—though you only need to view that first-page preview—you can also read the article at Internet Archive.)

The article, written by Joseph L. Miller, detailed several discoveries—"positive proof"—found since his last article on the Carter line had been published the previous year in the same quarterly. Among those items was correction of a detail concerning one Margaret Chew Carter, incorrectly noted to be wife of someone named Captain John Marshall. As Dr. Miller explained, it was actually her half-sister, also named Margaret, who had married the captain. Updating such discoveries for the record certainly helped up the author's trustworthiness level, at least in my opinion.

But who, exactly, was that writer in The William and Mary Quarterly? It took a bit more searching to discover that "Dr. Jos. L. Miller" was indeed a medical doctor, whose published works in his chosen field generally pertained to what has been called "his major hobby and passion," first the history of Western medicine, then eventually, local history and the history of various lines in his own family.

These lines included—fortunately for me—the Carter family from which Margaret Chew Carter eventually descended. Not long after publication of the 1909 and 1910 articles Joseph Lyon Miller wrote for The William and Mary Quarterly, he did indeed fold those "positive proof" discoveries into a 1912 volume he called The Descendants of Capt. Thomas Carter of "Barford," Lancaster County, Virginia, 1652-1912. 

From the reputation detailed in the biography included with a donation he made to a Virginia college, to examples of how he updated his own research, I feel Joseph Miller gains enough credibility to tentatively merit trustworthiness as a genealogical trailblazer—but remember, as we look at his discoveries on Margaret Chew Carter's forebears, we still need to keep that mantra close at hand: trust, but still verify.