Colony, Laurel County, Kentucky is another almost-certainly-bogus location (auto-completion error from old software)

Question

The same kinds of autocompletion errors in old genealogy software sent some of our ancestors to Y, Somme, Picardie, France, to die; swelled the population of Holland street in Reusel, Reusel-de Mierden, Noord-Brabant, Netherlands; mysteriously moved people's Dutch ancestors to Newfoundland and Labrador; and gave us other bogus locations have also been placing a lot of people in "Colony, Laurel, Kentucky," sometimes a as much as a century before European-derived settlers reached Kentucky.

Web-searching indicates that the only place called "Colony" in Laurel County, Kentucky, was a short-lived settlement of Swiss immigrants established in the 1880s. See this article about it. Somebody's family tree software probably substituted that name when a user entered "Colony" in a place name field.

Almost all (possibly all) instances of "Colony, Laurel, Kentucky" are wrong. The "Colony" place name should not legitimately appear in Laurel County before 1880, and it appears to have died out as a place name years ago (I don't know when).

Comments

Just as an aside to "Colony, Laurel, Kentucky": There never was a place called Colony in Laurel county. Swiss immigrants founded "die Kolonie Bernstadt, die Kolonie Langnau" and "die Kolonie Lily" in Laurel county. Somehow "Die Kolonie" or "Die Kolony" plus the name of the villages stuck. See Die Kolony Bernstadt. Also interesting to read Die Kolonie Bernstadt, Kentucky, in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung und ihrem gegenwärtigen Stande, published in 1884 in Bernstadt, KY.

Bernstadt still exists West of London on the road to Somerset. (I used to live in London for a while.)

---

I reached this article by searching “colony laurel county, Kentucky” listed as birth and death places for half a dozen alleged Cherokee ancestors of two people in my family.  There is not one source on any of them, and they have English birth names.  There is John Bland, born March 18, 1558 in Colony Laurel County Kentucky.  One of the females born in the late 1500s is actually given the name Cleopatra.  The only Europeans known before Jamestown’s settlers were the lost colonists of Roanoke, as far as I know.  Who else could have provided that name?  The site where that can be found is Family Search.  There is a source attribution to gedcom data, otherwise no actual record of any kind.  Walt Disney would make an animated movie from this, and there would be a greater chance of a shred of truth in the movie.

If anyone wants more specific info, I will provide it.

Answer 1

It is present on 9 profiles, so not really a candidate for an error.

http://wikitree.sdms.si/function/WTWebProfileSearch/Profiles.htm?Query=Colony%2C+Laurel+County%2C+Kentucky&MaxProfiles=500&SortOrder=BiDa&PageSize=10

Comments

But it needs to be removed from the drop down menu of place options so it doesn't become a db_error.

---

Jackson-17443 is a false positive result, by way of Albemarle County, Colony of Virginia and London, Laurel County, Kentucky, USA

---

London, Laurel County, Kentucky is a valid place. It's the county seat and probably the largest city. Please don't treat it as a location error.

I encountered Colony, Laurel, Kentucky as the birth location of a person born in 1673. Others had identified the location as impossible, but had been unable to reconcile it. The bad location had been created at leasr twice in different data imports. The woman's correct profile was marked as a rejected match due to the location discrepancy.

---

And Ales, I didn't intend to ask you to create a campaign to expunge these errors. Like it or not, db_errors is now only tag we have here that functions to alert people to chronic errors.

---

Ales (imagine the 'hat' on your ess),

your 9 profiles are before 1880 when the Swiss arrived, so the place name should be what the area was called before it became Die Kolony, right?

Kentucky has 120 counties, Laurel County (named for its mountain laurel trees) was created in 1825 from pieces of Rockcastle, Clay, Knox, and Whitley counties.  It is 436 square miles.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_counties_in_Kentucky

---

Jo, I think you misunderstand this error. Please don't "correct" the location to some other place name in Laurel County. This location entry is totally bogus.

The problem is that one or more early genealogy software packages (probably FamilyTree Maker) apparently autocompleted people's place name entries with totally bogus entries. If "Y" appeared in the death location, it was changed to "Y, Somme, Picardie, France." If "NL" appeared at the end of a location field (almost always meaning "Netherlands"), it was reinterpreted as "Newfoundland and Labrador." There are many other examples. All of us who have old Gedcoms or interact with other people's genealogy (that's pretty much everybody on WikiTree) need to be aware of bogus locations created by software -- and alert to the possibility when we encounter geography that doesn't fit with the rest of a person's biography..

People who were supposedly born, married, or died in Colony, Laurel, Kentucky probably never heard of Kentucky (it didn't exist in their lifetimes) and probably never lived anywhere near Kentucky.

---

Hi, Jo. I see that you edited Hezekiah Jones, who apparently did live in Kentucky in the 1800s. He's not typical of the profiles I found yesterday. They were people who lived in other places in earlier centuries.

No, Hezekiah Jones didn't live in Kentucky. His profile was created with a birth date of 1745 (not 1845) and parents born in the 1690s. The Kentucky records you found for him are at least valid records for a person named Hezekiah Jones, but the profile is connected to family members from an entirely different time (and from before Kentucky was first settled by people named Jones).

---

So far I've edited 16 profiles that included this location (I added messages about the error or removed the erroneous information) that weren't on the list created on Ales' system. There were just a couple of cases where the Colony, Laurel, Kentucky location was in the text and not the data fields. I wonder why the other instances don't show up on Ales' list.

UPDATE: Three hours later (I've not been working on this continuously) and I'm up to 32 profiles that included this location and weren't on Ales' list. In several instances, contributors had put a lot of effort into trying to reconcile how the person's life event occurred in Kentucky at a very early date or at a location far away from other location in the family's story, or in trying to determine what jurisdiction claimed Laurel County in the 17th or 18th century.

UPDATE 2: I ended up editing well over 60 profiles (not going to bother to count) that had this location in contexts where the location was not possible. I found most of them using Google Search; I still don't know Ales didn't find them.

---

You have 9 more with Colony Laurel Co Kentucky http://wikitree.sdms.si/function/WTWebProfileSearch/Profiles.htm?Query=Colony+Laurel+Co+Kentucky&MaxProfiles=500&SortOrder=BiDa&PageSize=10

If you search only for Colony Laurel Kentucky, you have 210 profiles.

http://wikitree.sdms.si/function/WTWebProfileSearch/Profiles.htm?Query=Colony+Laurel+Kentucky&MaxProfiles=500&SortOrder=BiDa&PageSize=10

Probably you were correcting such profiles.

---

Ellen, one last question on this matter.  What place name was autoreplaced with "Colony Laurel Kentucky."

---

I never owned Family Tree Maker software, I am not affiliated with the company that created it, I've never created a Family Tree on Ancestry.com, and I've not seen this particular autocomplete error documented anywhere. That's a long way of saying I don't know for sure what the software did.

My educated guess is that the word "Colony" was entered in the place name field and the software converted it to "Colony, Laurel, Kentucky." This is consistent with the theories on how various other autocomplete errors such as "Y, Somme, Picardie", "Holland, Reusel, Reusel-de Mierden, Noord-Brabant, Netherlands", U, Cocle, Panama, "Young, Texas, United States", and "Age, Cuanza Sul, Angola" came about. Another oddity I've seen is "Estonia" as a location for a person who almost certainly didn't live in Estonia -- I assume that somebody once entered "Est" (for "Estimated") in a place name field.

---

and my fav: "Sea, Manado, Sulawesi Utara, Indonesia"

---

I dont have softwear and was only looking up some swiss roots for my daughter. I only want to inform anyone interested,  my family originanted from Die Kolony Bernstadt which is in Laurel county, ky. It is still called Swiss Colony today there is an elementary school still open there (Colony Elementary).The original colony split in 2. One remains Swiss Colony the other became East Bernstadt.  The colony Didn't become a major town as to most most businesses settled few miles east in London,  Ky.  But it is a real place. Still is called Swiss Colony and East Bernstadt and most of the original settlers families are still close around spread between Swiss Colony and London on the original land that was purchased. My family still owns a portion of this land.  Just wanted to say we are real and do exist even if we dont have a major town called Colony. We now have community named Swiss Colony and a few of us or more still are proud of our Swiss roots. If i spoke out of turn or understanding please excuse me i havent followed your conversations only saw where they said Colony didn't exist and new it did and does and i am a member of one of the original families if it helps anyone.

---

How delightful to hear from you, Karen, and learn about the real story of this community! The online article I found about the Swiss Colony indicated that it had died out, but your message tells us that's not true.

I still don't believe that the people who were shown as having been born, married, or died in Colony ever lived in your family's community. If I remember correctly, those events were all before 1776 -- long before the Swiss Colony was started. And the entries didn't say "Swiss Colony," but just "Colony."

Since you and your daughter are researching Swiss roots, maybe you'd like to join us in Wikitree. This is a website where folks collaborate to document our shared ancestry (we're all cousins if you dig deep enough). I've learned an enormous amount here, and my personal ancestral tree has grown a good bit due to other people's work. And I've enjoyed helping others develop their genealogy.

---

It's also worth pointing out that there is a lot of confusion between Kentucky in general and the county of Kent in England. See this post. I may be wrong, but Kentucky didn't exist as such before 1776 and then it was a part of Virginia. It didn't become a state in its own right for another 20 years.

Therefore ANY data relating to Kentucky before 1766 is highly suspect.

Answer 2

According to https://www.city-data.com/city/Colony-Kentucky.html Colony, Laurel, Kentucky is at Lat 37.16N Long -84.19W. 2.5 miles from London, Kentucky.

Comments

Have you seen city-data's disclaimer at the bottom of the page? "City-data.com does not guarantee the accuracy or timeliness of any information on this site.  Use at your own risk." I would never use that site for anything "official."

Use, instead, the GNIS, which provides the government's location data, and was created the U.S. Geological Survey. Here is the search for "Colony," in Kentucky:https://geonames.usgs.gov/apex/f?p=138:2:::NO:RP::

The only place named Colony is in Fayette County.