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Monday, December 19, 2011

MY 4X GREAT GRANDMOTHER WAS NOT A COLLIE

In the interests of fairplay, some of the weird names and notations I've
found for my ancestors are not always because of errors by transcibers
and indexers at FamilySearch or Ancestry.com. Sometimes it's someone
else's fault.


Take, for example, the case of my 4x great grandmother Polly Griffith.

I was filling in some gaps on the Ames side of my family and was working
on the siblings of my 3x great grandmother Arvilla Ames over on Ancestry.com.
I discovered I had mixed up the death dates of her two brothers Ephraim
and Ezekiel. I went over to FamilySearch and found the death record listed
 for Ezekiel in the Massachusetts, Deaths, 1841-1915 collection. The
spelling of the names made me shake my head. Ezekel for Ezekiel, 
Johnathan ? Ames for his father Jonathan P Ames, and Collie Griffen 
for his mother Polly Griffith.

Now I'm used to seeing variations on the Griffth name, such as Griffeth and
Griffin so the Griffen isn't all that bad. But the Collie really got me ticked off
at whoever had indexed this record. I clicked through to view the image:


And there they all were, exactly as listed in the index,. I can't believe that
Ezekiel's daughter Julia Smith wouldn't have known her grandmother's first
name was Polly, so I think what we had here was a failure to communicate with
Dr. Pearl. Either that or he was the legendary old country doctor whose own
hearing was beginning to fade.

So now I have to figure out how to contact FamilySearch to let them my
ancestor wasn't a Collie.

1 comment:

Karen Packard Rhodes said...

I agree with you that the good doctor did not hear very well any more. He also could not spell worth a hoot!