I noticed on my family tree a green leaf popped up on my 2nd grandmother, Mary Jane Goodall. To my surprise and my mistake, her real name was Mary Jane Goodrich. I made a major goof and thankfully someone else caught it.
It can happen when you get too zealous in seeing how far this family goes back, that you start allowing other's family trees with their information to cloud what is the correct information. The bad intel, always "seems close to possible." and that is why so many believe the info to be correct which then spans a whole different story to your family tree -
I double checked my sources and right there, it was in the marriage certificate that I had saved. Mary Jane Goodrich and on closer review I saw that the census had another Mary Jane Goodall. Then I found that this other Mary Jane had married a different fellow - not my 2nd great-grandfather and a different set of parents. It's a mess.
It all opened up for me the more I looked. Granted, I probably did this particular family years ago - it was time for a check-up. (Any excuse to dig more into my ancestors)
But it wasn't all me!
Originally someone else put out the bad information - Find-a-Grave has listed Mary Jane Closson (her married name) with the parents of Mary Jane Goodall. This frustrates me. I will contest and suggest an edit but will have to do some research to prove my case.
I do feel awful that I perpetuated this wrong information. Thankfully, the good eyes of others on Ancestry picked up on it.
The good news, I get to go back and research a whole new line of Ancestors - that make a lot more sense than the Goodall Family.
I've done the same thing, Debby -- gone from someone's tree only to find that it was the wrong connection! It seems in my line there is a great tradition of naming more than one man in the family the same name! In some cases, the first child of that name died, so a second one got the name -- which happened to be the father's name... Eventually we sort it out but isn't the journey fun? I need to get back to my genealogy blog (which is basically only of interest to my family!). I've neglected it a bit for brighter, shinier objects!
ReplyDeleteThe Goodall name is one I have heard of in the UK
ReplyDelete