Question

Profile and refs completely disagree... what now?

Answer 1

I'm afraid the bad news is, your ancestors aren't yours.  A wrong turning's been taken.  We've all done it at one time or another.

Alice was only 27 when William Henry got married, so she wasn't his mother.  She was the mother of a younger William H.

So basically William H needs splitting into two profiles.

The older one gets the DoB, the wife, and the kids, but no bio or sources yet.

The younger one gets the parents and all the bio and sources.

Then you can leave the younger one aside and look for the parents of the older one.

Answer 2

Hi Stephan.  Honestly, I haven't examined the sources listed, but I see that you are the Profile Manager and are the only one who has logged any changes of the profile into the Changes log.  So I'm scratching my head about why you would enter a profile with data that disagrees with the sources?  I also see over 20 rejected merge proposals on the profile, so my guess would be that it's a pretty common name where the data for multiple individuals has become conflated.  I think the answer to 'What Now?' is much more research to  try to sort out info about this individual that distinguishes him from others with the same or similar name.  Just my opinion, hopefully others will chime in with suggestions.

Answer 3

It is a very common name so you will have to lay out all the sources.  I find it helpful to lay them out chronologically.  Do they all make sense?  Or do some of them put the person in two places at once?  Married to two women at the same time?  Have children born months apart on different sides of the country.  If you do this, it should become pretty clear what belongs to each individual.

Added:  I looked at the profile.  It definitely needs more sources.  What I have suggested doesn't work with so few.

Comments

Thanks for your thoughts. Truth is I created this profile in my beginning days of genealogy with references that were given to me... It is obvious that the references and profile are not matched... If this were my own tree I would scrap the profile and start again! My question should be: Do I remove the sources... or remove the connections? Either way, I will need to recheck rejected matches!

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Hi Stephen,

Now that I've looked at the profile and sourced it, if you're happy with what I've done, please let me know. I'll source the childrens' and spouse's profiles to the best of my ability and then remove the connections as they belong to another William. The censuses you had do refer to this individual.

The marriage reference for Archie is great for Archie, but not this William, so that should be on Archie's profile and could be on his mother's but not William's.

I know it's hard when an individual is confused and it's easy to do. It won't be the first and certainly not the last time :) The plus is these are profiles in an age where records are fairly abundant, as opposed to 1600, 1700s.

-Raewyn.

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Thanks.  I've arranged it so that Stephen's original profile continues to relate to his own ancestor (Percy's father).  The detective is now https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Lawrence-14395.