I
have encountered family trees published in various documents over the years.
Initially I relied on these histories to flesh out my own tree. As I did more
research myself and dug into actual records, though, I began to realize many of
these stories often had the wrong people in the wrong places. That was
especially true for people who were not directly part of the ancestral line of
the authors.
For
example, there are three family summaries published and available, online as it
turns out, for the Bullock/Bulloch family who emigrated from Scotland to Canada
with later lines moving to various parts of the United States.
Two
Anderson siblings, James (1822-1892), a 2nd great-granduncle of mine,
and Janet (1827-1892), my 2nd great-grandaunt, married Bullock
siblings, both marriages taking place in Lanark County, Ontario. Their father,
Gilbert Anderson, had brought his family to Canada in 1832. I wrote about him
in a post
on 15 October 2013 and about his wife, Margaret Maitland on
22 Oct 2013.
I
suspect that errors creep into the family histories as a result of undocumented
stories passed down verbally through the generations. Descendants don’t always
have the inclination to check out information written in the books they have
been given, particularly, as I said, for people to whom they are not directly
related. The mistakes, unfortunately, get attached to other family trees as
more family historians copy the data, but also do not go to the trouble of
checking and verifying it.
There
are three publications available – that I know of – that described the history
of the Bullock or Bullock family and, incidentally the Anderson family:
·
Genealogy of the
Bulloch, Anderson, Coleman and Knobbs Families (1910) by
Hellen Knobbs Bulloch;
·
History of
Hancock County, Illinois (1880) by Thomas Gregg; and
·
A Genealogy of
James Bullock and Mary Hill, Latter Day Saint Pioneers by Kenneth C.
Bullock, 1964.
The
main problem in all of the publications is that there are no citations
indicating where information was sourced.
Genealogy of the Bulloch, Anderson, Coleman and
Knobbs Families
– In this book, the author indicated the parents of Gilbert Anderson, my 3rd
great grandfather, were John Anderson and Margaret Wilson, Gilbert’s birth year
as 1794 and his birth place as Glasgow (Scotland). His death was reported by
the author as 18 July 1872 (according to Ontario records it was actually 22
July 1871). I accepted the family names for a while as have many other
researchers. They appear in many published family trees. The problem was that I
could not find any birth, marriage or death information in Scottish records
that would confirm the relationship. The write-up lists six siblings of Gilbert
so that should have been helpful in finding the family. After an exhaustive
search of Scottish records on ScotlandsPeople
I finally found his birth entry which showed his parents as James Anderson and
Janet Finlay, his baptism date as 12 October 1792 and birth place as Campsie,
Stirlingshire, Scotland. Gilbert was baptized as Gabriel but his actual birth
date was not recorded in the church register. From that information I did find
the other five children as well, all records having the same parents’ names. So
the author had the children’s names mostly right – there was one child missing
from her list – but the parents wrong. Because the information had come from so
far back (late 1700s) and the parents had never left Scotland, the truth had
been lost in the stories that were handed down.
History of Hancock County – The write-up
on John Bullock, now with a ‘k’ in his name, says he married Jennet (Janet) Anderson
in 1834 but gives no details of her family. The account also says he was born
in Western Canada although it should actually have said Canada West, which was
later to become the province of Ontario. The marriage was actually in 1844 as
Jennet or Janet would only have been seven years old in 1834.
A Genealogy of James Bullock and Mary Hill – There is a
write-up for Janet Bullock, who married James Anderson in 1848. It notes he was
born “abt. 1826, of Lanark, Ontario, Canada” and was the son of Gilbert
Anderson and Margaret Maitland. The parents’ names are right but he would have
been born in Scotland since the family did not arrive in Canada until 1832.
While there was a Lanark County, there was not a Canada or a province of
Ontario until 1867.
In the same book the write-up for John
Bullock indicates he married Janet Anderson who was born “15 May 1827,
Kirkintillock, Dumbartonshire, Scotland [sic]” and was the daughter of Gilbert
and Margaret. One problem is that no birth/baptism records can be found for
Janet in Kirkintilloch, Dunbartonshire, or for two of her brothers, John (b.
1829) and Robert (b. 1832). While the family may well have been there from 1827
to 1832, I have not found any register of the births anywhere. One daughter was
born in Kirkintilloch in 1826; we have that record. We know they arrived in
Canada in 1832 from a number of sources (US censuses, obituaries, death
records, etc.). John Bullock was shown to have been born in Campsie,
Stirlingshire, Scotland. The Anderson family lived in the Campsie area as well
where their first two children were born suggesting the families may have been
acquainted before they came to Canada, although it was reported the Bullocks
emigrated in 1819. Janet’s birth date must come from family lore. It is
recorded on her grave stone and may be in a family bible but I have not yet
seen any formal document confirming the date.
Books
like these can be useful as they may point a family historian in the right
direction initially but they can also be very misleading as they very often do not have references or citations that will allow a reader to check
dates, places and names. The summaries often come down through the generations
verbally as well and mistakes can certainly be made in final transpositions of
the stories.
Wayne Shepheard is a volunteer with the Online Parish Clerk program in England, handling four
parishes in Devon, England. He has published a
number of articles about various aspects of genealogy and is the Editor of Relatively Speaking, the
quarterly journal of the Alberta Genealogical Society. Wayne also provides
genealogical consulting services through his business, Family History Facilitated
