DaveBlackston

I've got to run, but thanks for chatting! (The kids need to go to sleep.)

That's a good idea. I will do that in the near future. (And it'd be nice to get a real answer under my belt.)

Heh. That's a nice secondary effect.

Here's a q for you. The DAR has his bday as 1758. How accurate are their records of Revolutionary War veterans? Is that suitable for a q on SE?

Yes. This was a 4 year (+/- one day) difference.

Yes, and that retrofitting would still be less than a year, right?

;-)

Harrumph.

I remember a detective story I read as a kid that depended on something occurring during one of the skipped dates. I felt a bit cheated. I didn't think a kid should be expected to know that.

nod Good thought.

The birthdays (October 20 and October 21) are very similar.

My theory is that he lied about his age so he could join the Continental army for the Revolution.

(I'm full of 'em.)

Wanna hear my wild thwory?

Well, there are no John Whites born in the Barbour between 1753 and 1760.

Let me verify something...

I noticed that. Part of the digestion. :)

I checked all the J's.

Also, there was definitely only one John.

There were unlikely to be any skipped Whites -- they are lised alphabetically and I noticed no gaps.

White married into an influential family that has all sorts of references.

Oh there were births before and after, though I admittedly did not check for 1758 itself.

I did -- I am still digesting the links.

FWIW, I did have more luck finding WHite references in Ohio. I did that by searching for his father-in-law. ;-)

I searched ancestry.com -- I've not yet gotten comfortable with the other resources out there.

No -- they're all scanned so I did page through the Pomfret volume.

And that sounds like ancestry might be the wrong resource for that town. ;-)

@JanMurphy : Nothing sneaky. Pomfret is one of the cataloged towns so I looked through that volume a bit. I also searched for "John White" and White born in Pomfret in the Barbour collection specifically.

@JanMurphy -- Glad you are OK. I lived in the Bay Area for 20+ years and moved to NYC last year. I do not miss the quakes, but nasty winters are not any fun either.

You too! See you online in the not-too-distant future, I imagine. :)

Yes. I am becoming more organized.

(More time effective than me going through the docs.)

I've though about paying for a professional to go through those papers looking for Ebenezer and Vestus.

(That's about some guy who spent a lot of time documenting Blackstones.)

Genealogist extraordinary, who wrote a number of genealogical and historical summaries on the Blackstone family. He also corresponded with many Blackstone families of many spellings. He kept hundreds of family group sheets which were donated by his wife Edna Blackstone to the New England Historical Genealogical Society (NEHGS) library in Boston after his death. The NEHGS is located at 101 Newbury St., Boston, MA 02116.

I have poked around the site. There's actually some documents there of very strong interest to me...

;-)

At that point the risk analysis becomes a little more muddled.

Ahhh..

I'm good at coming up with (in most cases unverifiable) theories to explain apparent conflicts.

(I know you know all this -- sorry if I am stating the obvious)

wrt, the baptism/census conflict... 2 years (more or less) is plenty of time for the baptized child to pass away and another child be born and given the same name. Since time machines don't exist (as far as we know) that'd be the theory I would investigate. Perhaps there are death records for that parish and time period that might be illuminating?

I've seen the inferential genealogy video before. Pretty interesting stuff.

Is the baptism record an original source, or could there have been a type in its transcription?

Yeah. Probate records are looking more and more helpful, but not easy to obtains.

I am actually really lucky that my family can be traced back as far as it has been.

I'm willing to spend a lot of time searching for the new connections, but (especially when dealing with the 18th century) there is a possibility that the records just are not there.

Or not. ;-) One of my personal metaphors for this research is a set of combined jigsaw puzzles with lots of missing pieces, but if one is clever one can find multiple ways to connect the pieces together.

Are they related to former boxing champion George Foreman? (He named all of his boys George Edward Foreman.)

Ok. Did they have lambhourginis that went at 88 mph back then? ;-)