Would anybody like to create profiles for some people in the Peerage with the surname White?

Question

For the past few months, I've been working on two surnames per month from the five most recent generations of my ancestors and my wife's ancestors. I sorted those surnames by number of profiles on WikiTree, and start each January with the most popular surnames (in terms of profiles on WikiTree) -- with and without One Name Studies on WikiTree, and then carry on each month with the next most popular.

This month, I'm working on Whites. Of the Whites listed on ThePeerage.com, I've checked 221 so far (mostly with first names starting with A plus some others who just kind of came up). Of those, 28 have duplicate entries, 42 are living, and 52 didn't have White as their Last Name At Birth, leaving a net of 99 tallied Whites. Of those, 43 (43.4%) have profiles on WikiTree.

Here are some of the Whites from the Peerage who don't (yet) have WikiTree profiles:

• A. White
• Ada Frances Isabel White
• Adeline Elizabeth White
• Agnes Cecil White
• Agnes Mary White
• Aimée Isabella White
• Aison White
• Alan A. White
• Albert White
• Alfred White
• Alfred Henry White
• Alice White
• Alice White
• Alice White

(And, yes, if you check through the list, you'll see why most of these people don't have profiles. Many of them have no dates, no sources, and sometimes not even full names listed. So this is a particularly challenging challenge. If you do manage to turn up more information on any of these people, feel free to alert Darryl Lundy, who runs ThePeerage.com. There's an email link at the bottom of every page on his site.)

As profiles get added, I'll remove them from this list, and add new ones to replace them. (There are plenty of Whites without profiles. Trust me.)

Comments

Should also check them carefully. We've found some problems with the Scottish entries. I wouldn't include any that sources can't be found for.

Answer 1

The England Project, the Scotland Project, and the Magna Carta Project all consider thepeerage.com to be an unreliable source, so I would advise extreme caution when using it as a basis for adding profiles to WikiTree.

Comments

Thanks Jen. To further explain, it is regarded as unreliable because some of the information is user submitted and is not actually checked against reliable sources before being published on the site. A pre-1700 English profile should not be created on the basis of the peerage as a source. A reliable source such as a will or parish register should be sought.

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Yes the Peerage website is most useful when it explains its sources. It is at its most problematic when there are insufficient sources given or when there is information which is not quite the same as what we can find in the sources. Very often the sources are standard ones such as Complete Peerage or Richardson's books, so it is easier to use those directly.

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Unreliable when it refers back to the published version, as a sole source, is another example.

How does Burkes Peerage rank, say if it were the sole source cited?

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Burkes is also considered unreliable, it contains many errors.

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It would save a lot of time and energy if you would actually read my post all the way through.

Please note that I said,

Many of them have no dates, no sources, and sometimes not even full names listed. (Emphasis added.)

So I already stated (although perhaps not expllicitly enough) that before adding any profiles for people listed in ThePeerage.com, I would expect that people would find other sources (preferably primary sources, although the farther back in time you go, the harder those are to find) for those people.

I do think Darryl's a good guy, and I consider ThePeerage to be an extremely ambitious project, especially considering that he's doing it all himself. But he's only human, and just as prone to mistakes as any of us. (Show me a source with "no errors" in it, and I'll show you a source that hasn't been checked thoroughly enough. I write in to Library and Archives Canada, the B.C. Archives, FreeBMD, and Find A Grave to note errors often enough that they probably groan, "Oh, no. Him again!" when they see my address in the From: line, and my fingerprints are all over certain articles on Trove and Wikipedia.) I have sent him any number of corrections on the basis of sources that I have turned up for the profiles that I have worked on. But I also recognise that he hasn't finished transcribing all of Burke's Peerage yet, let alone processing all the corrections he's been getting by email. (Some of which appear to be inaccurate, due to people passing on family lore which isn't verified by sources.)

So I don't consider ThePeerage.com a primary source, and always list links to it beneath a "See also:" header when I add them. (And, similarly, I don't consider Wikipedia to be a primary source, either, and link to it the same way.)

All that being said, we can't just write off ThePeerage.com. The people running Wikidata have decided to add all the entries from ThePeerage.com to Wikidata, sourced or not. Since Aleš's suggestions include data from Wikidata, including possible family members, and a lot of those connections come from ThePeerage.com entries, Wikitreers are already seeing suggestions based on the contents of ThePeerage.com. Therefore, it seems to me that the wise thing to do is research ThePeerage.com entries properly, and have the correct information already on WikiTree, so that if anyone goes to add a profile on the basis of an entry on ThePeerage.com, they'll see that:

1. It's already been done, and
2. it's been done correctly,

and therefore not add incorrect information to WikiTree.

I would also argue that it's also in our interest to pass on the corrections we turn up to Darryl, so that he can correct the errors on ThePeerage.com, so that it will no longer have incorrect information on it. (Granted, in my experience, it usually takes him about three weeks to make a correction, and that process would probably take even longer if more WikiTreers sent him corrections. But that's just one of the costs of fighting for goodness, niceness, and the accurate way. And other sites can take months to make corrections.)

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Sorry this reply is very late, but I've heard, and I believe is correct, that when corrections are submitted, Darryl, cites the email and not whatever sources may have been cited in the email.  Unfortunately this means that the corrections are viewed as being cited by an unreliable source (somone's email).

However I do admire him for the the amount of work that he has put in to his website over the years.

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Yes. That is one of the things that I don't like about the way Darryl works: when I send him a correction, he lists my email as the source instead of the sources I send him. I want to say, "Dude. I'm not the authority here. This source is."

Although I've noticed that he's also started to list WikiTree as a source. At least if people look at a WikiTree entry, they should be able to see the sources that it depends on.

Answer 2

I would really like to do this. It could be cute especially if any of them end up being related to me but no I would be nice to just help out another branch of whites

Comments

Yeah, that's basically why I started these surname studies: I've hit brick walls on all of my ancestral lines, so I started working on notables and people from the peerage to see if I could find other connections.