Advice before editing this pre-1700 Witherspoon profile?

Question

I have information to contribute to the profile of Janet (Witherspoon) Fleming. This is what I can add: I need to separate a faulty merge, One woman, Janet Witherspoon) Fleming is married to two different men, Joseph Fleming-3290,  and John Fleming-631 living in 2 different colonies Massachusetts and South Carolina while giving birth to children in both colonies. This Janet Witherspoon is the daughter of John Witherspoon-189 and the Janet (Witherspoon) Witherspoon-24

These are the sources I am using:

• Genealogy of the Witherspoon Fanily by James Wardlaw, which uses the memories   written by Gavin Witherspoon her nephew.

Should I contact one of the pre-1700 projects or know about any style guidelines before proceeding? Thank you!

Answer 1

Since this profile is not project-managed, I'd say you are free to create a second profile and parse out the information belonging to each of the two women.  You could revert the profile to how it looked in 2012 but that might make it harder rather than easier at this point.

As a pre-1700 profile you should use reliable sources https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:Pre-1700_Resource_Page; this one still clearly has gedcom-import junk in it and "familysearch.org" is clearly not a source.  If you want an example that is a little simpler than some, here's one I created https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Goulder-219 (not to brag or anything :)

That particular Witherspoon family book here does not provide specific sources for it's assertions from what I saw so by pre-1700 standards it would be considered a research guide to find primary records and could be cited as a "See Also" but not as a primary source and would not be adequate by itself.  It makes the usual statements about extensive research, town and church records etc which is well and good but ideally you should find actual primary sources you can cite to support specific facts.

Best of luck and thanks for taking on the cleanup!

Answer 2

From the change history, I get the impression that the subject profile (https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Witherspoon-123) was formerly about (or at least mostly about) the Massachusetts Janet (Witherspoon) Fleming, but more recent edits have mistakenly injected some details for the South Carolina woman.

It appears to me that there is another profile intended to represent the South Carolina Janet (Witherspoon) Fleming at https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Witherspoon-229. I suggest that you move content about, and family connections for, the South Carolina woman from Witherspoon-123 to Witherspoon-229 and edit the profiles to discuss what is known or believed about the relationships (or lack thereof) between the two Witherspoon women and the two Fleming husbands.

Once the profiles have been deconflated, we can project-protect them under the Massachusetts Project (for -123) and US Southern Colonies Project (for -229).

Comments

Both profiles are in desperate need of sourcing. The Witherspoon genealogy at https://archive.org/details/historygenealogy00with may not be the be-all and end-all of sources (I have not evaluated it), but it looks like a good place to start. Be sure to clearly attribute the content to the source ("According to The history and genealogy of the Witherspoon family (1400-1972), blah, blah, blah").

I have added the Massachusetts project as a profile manager for Witherspoon-123. When you have finished moving erroneous spouse and children to the other profile, please post a profile message on that profile asking for PPP to be added.