Where do the rights of family members stand in opposition to the rights of historians, both amateur and professional?

[Sally Regina Anderson Goodson]

I had a great fourth grade teacher, Edna Jagoe. It had been her passion to save the East Texas forest and that passion saved The Big Thicket. But, that is not why I brought her up. She
taught our class this, “Your rights end where my nose begins.” I’m 55 years old
now, so I guess I’ve been keeping that thought around for 45 years. I believe
she meant it physically and mentally.

It came to mind recently over comments regarding my family and my family heritage. Just where should the line be drawn when people start talking about your family? I am the third great
granddaughter of a Noble Anderson Sr., who was born in Pennsylvania in 1769.
With the help of friends and family members, a line of ancestors and
descendants has been well established, documented and sometimes photographed.
When someone adamantly claims I’m lying about one member, they cast fault on
the entire tree because the tree does not stand alone; it is made up of the
collective.

I don’t expect everyone to agree on everything. Some family members don’t agree with me 100% but we are able to communicate, share the day’s news, encourage one another during sickness and
infirmity, express joy over good news and laugh at some of the crazy things we
tell one another. So, it works well. I believe it is called respecting one
another due to a common thread that runs between us.

Open discussion can be good. History will never change but you might know something I don’t. And, I might know something you don’t. However, when folks begin to get to the point that
they are claiming to be close to proving I don’t exist to make their point, I
believe that has gone too far. That’s a good example of being over the line. It
becomes silly.

When all one has to prove a point is one newspaper article and it tells a story no one had heard of before it came out, more time needs to be spent on how it came about, who was involved,
how do other facts refute the article or support it. Especially when the
newspaper the author works for has the owner write his cousin in Missouri
saying he isn’t sure the article is true and wants some sort of corroboration,
which four years later, by the account of another article in the same newspaper
states, never happened. Not one person came out and recognized a man’s
photograph from Brownwood as the person they knew as Bloody Bill Anderson. You can’t tell the whole story by leaving
that part of it out.

When does it cross the line discussing a woman’s virtue? A woman is said to be the mother of two young boys in an old cemetery in Brownwood. But, if you look at the dates on the graves, the boys
were born during her marriage to my great uncle but the story is perpetuated
instead of being researched. Do the
people claiming still that she is the mother of the two Roberts boys in Roberts
cemetery want to accuse her of bigamy, adultery…..it would have to be one or
the other for their story to be true. But, again, it is as simple as just looking
at the boys tombstones and reading their dates of birth to realize this poor,
maligned cousin of mine could not have been their mother. She was busy giving
birth to 10 other children with my great uncle. But, the people who believe I
don’t exist still continue to tell the story that poor, old Martha Anderson is
the mother to these two Roberts boys. It is a shame to do this to her memory.
But, that’s what happens when the line is crossed.

I could go on but there are too few here that really are interested in this silliness. I just wanted to say that I think we should be careful when in the face of a family member; we take
one or two small foibles of their family history and try to tear down the whole
thing.

Sally Anderson Goodson

[Sally Regina Anderson Goodson]

That sounds about par for the course.

[Arizona Mommy]

Wow, well, I'm new and don't know what'd going on w/ any of this but I can tell you off the bat that I had been trying to research my families history for years, picking up where my grandpa left off, and names were mispelled so it was very hard. But these were immigrants coming to American so the American's were constantly spelling the names wrong. But, I do have one part of my family tree dating back to 1750 in Sicily (no one famous) and I suppose I'd be upset if someone disputed me about it.

I just know that as far as the mispellings, it's led me to errors. I've thought I've been so close at times to filling in the blanks, and I've been on the wrong trail all along.

[Sally Regina Anderson Goodson]

Keep up the good work, it is very rewarding. I've been very lucky with names. Only one name really gets a different spelling. And, most of my folks have been here from the late 1680s.

[Jen]

Great question, Sally. I don't know that there is much one can do to stop someone spreading mis-information about a family if there isn't a dramatic financial gain from it (movie contrcts etc). A branch on my family tree got a significant about (seven digits) after their husband/father was portrayed as a pantywaist when there were mountains of documentation to the contrary. Usually, as crass as it may sound, our late family members aren't in a position to care, can't suffer loss as a result, and the other party doesn't turn a profit to go after.

As a lifelong genealogist and a more recent recruit to the Old West, I spent a long time trying to put out little fires of inaccuracy here and there, and found that I was making myself nuts. People are going to say what they want and many have no interest in ruining a good story with the truth. Unfortunately, being stupid isn't illegal, nor is being a jerk. I chose to continue along on my own research, share my information who those of my choosing, and publish when I am ready.

In my own family, I have the will of a multi-great grandfather (no one famous) that is slightly confusing to some, but I also have further documentation to back up my conclusions regarding which are children and which are grandchildren. The decision to share those items depends totally on the other party's reception of me questioning their position and how they reached it. If they stomp their feet, I share nothing. The document is out there in the county clerck's office and they are welcome to find it on their own. If they have something to back it up or seem open to more information, I happily send what I have along. I keep that in mind when others approach me. I don't have every single scrap of info on anyone, and don't consider myself the final word on anything. There is plenty that I have missed and others didn't. It comes down to attitude. One cousin has completely derailed a branch of our tree that she published online due to faulty research, but previous interactions with her leave me uninterested in trying to put out that fire. In my view, my job as a researcher is to find the most reliable and complete information on my subject, not correct other peoples' misdirected/misleading information. I found I got a lot more research done when I quit worrying about others. I share with some, and the rest, I can't fix.

You know your information and the truth contained in it. By jumping up to defend your own research that you consider credible everytime someone else gets it wrong (on purpose or by an unwillingness to look at new information), you are wasting time better spent expanding your own knowledge.

I don't consider family members to necessarily be more informed/accurate than an unrelated researcher. That's a case-by-case deal. Documents handed down through the tree leave an outsider in the dark, while 'Uncle Ned' stories can lead a family insider on a wild relative chase.

An additional two cents regarding spelling, if find how the family members spell(ed) their name to be nearly irrelevant in the bigger picture. The researcher knows how it was spelled when it was handed down to them. But other than that, what matters is how everyone else spelled it (census taker, recorder, clerk, immigration officer, etc) so you can find them in the records.

Just a few more coins in the opinion pot.
Jen

[Arizona Mommy]

Wow Jen, I like what you say about not wanting to make yourself go nuts with inaccuracy. I guess I was/am doing that with history in general. It drives me nuts when I hear people discussing history that I know is incorrect (and it's not like I know that much)

When I was talking about the mispellings it was with census, Ellis Ellis, marriage, baptism, death, etc. certificates. this is from family from Italy and it seemed that everytime I had another "record" of information, the spelling was different. Part of that problem though was that they were immigrants and I suppose the people gathering the information didn't understand what they were saying. It's actually interesting to watch their names evolve over the course of time, and mine too.

I think accurate history is good. I think all people learn from history and it is good to have an accurate portrayal of history but many times it is written in view of the person writting it which may not neccesarily be accurate, even with geneology unfortantely.

[Rollie W. Taylor]

Sally, that's an excellent summary of the absurd conclusions of an amateur historian with a myopic view and a closed mind. Although variations of Henry C. Fuller's article about the man who claimed to be Bloody Bill Anderson were published in several newspapers, multiple publications do not make the story credible. The story of his escape from the ambush near Orrick, Missouri, is fabricated and totally false.

[Sally Regina Anderson Goodson]

And, contrary to some people's statements, I do exist. Glad you found the message, Rollie.

[Bob Boze Bell]

Sally, speaking for a few of us, I am very interested in "this silliness" and it's a huge deal what happens when family history runs up against academic or popular history. Unfortunately, most family history is fiction and quite a bit of mainstream history as well. Also, I don't agree that history doesn't change, history changes all the time. It's not granite, as I once believed, it's more like jello, runny jello at that.

[Rollie W. Taylor]

Bob, speaking for the descendants of Noble Anderson and not for family historians in general, Sally and I, the descendants of Noble Anderson (b. 1769 in PA), have found conclusive proof (census records, death records) that the claim of our great-great uncle William C. Anderson of Brown County, TX, that he was "Bloody Bill" Anderson as reported by Henry C. Fuller is without merit. It is a historically accepted fact that William T. "Bloody Bill" Anderson was killed in the ambush near Orrick, MO, in 1864. For a comparison of the lives of the two men, see http://unclebilly.texas-heartland.com/2Williams.html

[Sally Regina Anderson Goodson]

What I meant that history doesn't change, is that the events are what they are. What we learn about them changes. That makes what we think about these events change.

I do believe that most family stories are not based on reliable facts but I find calling them fiction a little insulting to the families. There are some in my family that believe an uncle of my grandfather was Bloody Bill. He was not, facts prove that he was not. Reliable documentation prove he was not. But, when one of his descendants say he was, I think calling them liars or believing in fiction is harsh, if they believe what they were told and have never looked at the historic documents proving otherwise.

The "silliness" refers to the lengths that some people will go to when holding onto the myths. Someone will tell anyone who listens I don't exist just to try to keep his story about my family from caving in. He has created an elaborate "conspiracy" theory about me and many others. It is silliness. But, it won't ever change the true history of my family. It just changes what people think about it.