It doesn’t matter what I believe. It only matters what I can prove!
— LT Daniel Kaffee
Say Anything …
Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.
— John Adams
Say Anything …
… prior to 1660 only five persons out of over 33,000 had genuine middle names.
— Kent P. Bailey & Ransom B. True [1]
[1] Kent P. Bailey and Ransom B. True, A Guide to Seventeenth-Century Virginia Court Handwriting, Second Reprint 2015 (Richmond, Virginia: Virginia Genealogical Society, The Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities) p29.
Say Anything …
If an unsourced, private tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, serious genealogists cheer.
— Serious genealogist
18,312 and Counting
Our focus shifted in 2021 from the Watne branch to the Spratlin and Knight branches. In May 2021, we made a major breakthrough in the Spratlin line, realizing the widely-held belief that James Spratling (1742–1812) was the son of John Spradlin (1712–1769) and Mary English (1713–1756) was pure fiction, fake genealogy. We also invested considerable time improving the Knight family profiles on WikiTree in an effort to more widely disseminate recent research into the Knights of colonial Virginia.
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Doveryai, no proveryai.
— Russian proverb
Say Anything …
Is the genealogist insisting on sourced facts the whacker or the mole in Whac-a-Mole?
— kms
17,350 and Counting
The early part of 2020 was devoted to finding Alpheus Adam’s maternal line using a combination of genetic genealogy and old-fashion research into the history of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Canada and the United States. And 2020 closes as we found possible parents for Andrew Porter Sr. in County Donegal, Ireland.
Say Anything …
By a curious quirk of human nature, rather than Mother Nature, every American family of the surname Washington is related to George, all Adamses are of the family of John Quincy, and all Jeffersons are cousins of Thomas—at least as far as family traditions are concerned.
— Elizabeth Shown Mills, C.G., F.A.S.G.
Say Anything …
If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?
— Coach John Wooden