John Atkinson's Mother?

Question

When I proposed a merge of John Atkinson-668, my 6th great grandfather, and John Atkinson-37, who are pretty clearly the same person, based on their biographies, the merger was made into an Unmerged Match by Jillaine Smith with this comment:

"Same as Atkinson-37, but have to resolve mothers before merging."

This is a perfectly reasonable comment and I have tried as hard as I can to resolve the mother issue to no avail. Atkinson-37's mother is given as Susan Elizabeth Rogers (Rogers-1117) and Atkinson-668's mother as Susanna Doyle (Doyle-1610). (Both fathers are the same: Thomas Atkinson-1854.) There are no supporting sources for either mother in their profiles except for Ancestry family trees and I have looked at all the sources that I am aware of and found nothing to support either one.

What I would like to do is to detach the mother from each of the John Atkinson profiles and proceed to merge them with an unknown mother unless someone can provide some evidence for one or the other. After that I want to work on his wife: Sarah Merrick, Myrick, Meyrick, or Mirick.

Answer 1

Ok, in looking through past merges, there were a couple of bad merges done.   There was a John Atkinson who married a Susan Doyle.   But they both lived in the 1500s.  If you look at http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Doyle-1610, you can see the remnants of the profiles that were incorrectly merged because there were several Susan Unknowns.   Not sure what happened with the John Atkinsons.   My suggestion is to remove Susan Doyle from this family, put her birth back at 1553, death at 1600, detach John Atkinson and go from there.

Answer 2

Continuing with this line, John Atkinson is listed with three wives named Merrick, Myrick, and Mirick. My attempts to merge them have been met with Unmerged Matches. While they seem definitely to refer to the same person, there are a lot of questions about their genealogies. 

First the name: Robert Anderson uses the name Merrick for other families, namely John, Thomas, and William, and he does not use the other spellings at all. So I think that Merrick should be the spelling used in Wikitree. 

Second, John Atkinson definitely married a woman named Sarah Mirrick on April 27, 1664 in Newbury, Essex, Massachusetts, (Family Search). Who was this Sarah? The profiles say that she was 1.) born in 1618 in Wales, the daughter of John and Dorothy Bishop Meyrick, She would have been 46 at the time of her marriage and unlikely to have had all those children. 2.) born in 1640 in Charlestown, Mass., parents unknown, and 3.) born on May 9,1643 in Charlestown, Mass., the daughter of James and Margaret Unknown Merrick. I have found that there was a Sarah Merrick born on May 9, 1643 in Springfield, Mass., but not in Charlestown. The birth date seems right, but Springfield and Newbury are 100 miles apart, a lot in 17th Century New England. Also, according to various family trees, this Sarah married a man named Hitchcock in 1667 in Springfield and moved to Connecticut.

What I would like to do is merge all three of these wives into Merrick-348 and show an unknown birth date and place and unknown parents.