Should all Gateway Ancestor connections (backward) be marked as "confident"?

Question

Should all documented ancestors of a Gateway Ancestor be marked as confident?

An example:

13. Edward is the son of Hawte Wyatt [confident]
14. Haute is the son of George Wyatt [confident]
15. George is the son of Thomas Wyatt [unknown confidence]
16. Thomas is the son of Elizabeth (Brooke) Warner [confident]
17. Elizabeth is the daughter of Thomas Brooke [unknown confidence]
18. Thomas is the son of Margaret (Neville) Brooke [unknown confidence]
19. Margaret is the daughter of Edward (Neville) de Neville [unknown confidence]
20. Edward is the son of Joan (Beaufort) de Neville LG [confident]
21. Joan is the daughter of John (Plantagenet) of Gaunt KG [confident]
22. John is the son of Edward (Plantagenet) of England [confident]
This makes Edward III the 20th great grandfather of Anna.

Hawte Wyatt is a documented Gateway Ancestor to Edward III and many Surety Barons. If the line is documented in the source(s) used for the various projects, shouldn't all the documented connections from the Gateway Ancestor to the project focus individual(s) be marked as confident?

Or, am I missing something somewhere?

Comments

 Learned something new -- googled <what is a gateway ancestor> which turns out to be someone descended from royalty, aristocracy, or landed gentry. 

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I had to laugh at your response because my experience was similar. After years of manually worked family genealogy where the term never came up but once in the electronic environment I came across my first 'Gateway Ancestor' profile tag. I had to query the group to ask: "What's a gateway ancestor? Is it some kind of club?".

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Well, Leigh Anne, it was a new term in my world, too, after 40+ yrs of research ... what will they think of next?

Answer 1

I do not aim to always fill these in because they can never be reverted to something more neutral after they've been set. I'd say very many connections should have a more neutral confidence.

Comments

Ditto.  And the fact that we might have 4 options or only 3 options, by historical accident, makes it impossible to define how the options should be used.

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Magna Carta members are now asked to provide "primary" sources to establish a parent-child relationship before marking the relationship confident.  No longer is it sufficient (Magna Carta Project policy) to cite Douglas Richardson (MCA) as the supporting source for marking a parent-child relationship as confident.  Of course this does not prevent someone from marking these relationships as confident but as Andrew said you can not return to the unmarked state once the status has been changed to confident.

Regards.

David Douglass, Magna Carta Project

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Thank you. That could be a tough task.

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Thank you David. Not that it matters to pre-1500 but on the 1500-1700 side of things I've been adding only primary sources to profiles. :-)

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That is excellent !  Good sources = Good genealogy.

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what David said :D

Here's the link: https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:Magna_Carta_Project_Policy_and_Procedures#When_to_select_.22Confident.22

And while a gateway ancestor (generic) is as previously stated, [[Category:Gateway Ancestors]] is a maintenance/tracking category under the Magna Carta Project, which primarily includes profiles for Gateways listed by Richardson in his Magna Carta Ancestry. From the category page:

Our Gateway Ancestors are the American colonists with Magna Carta ancestry whose well-documented ancestral lines are treated in Douglas Richardson's Magna Carta Ancestry and Royal Ancestry (links are to WikiTree's source pages for them).

Answer 2

Many people fail to set these (and other) flags on profiles, I don't think it's necessarily an issue with Gateway Ancestors only. The trouble is that it's a multi-step process. You first have to create a profile, then set the marriage flags on a different page, then set flags for confidence & whether they have no more siblings and children, then if they died young you also need to go to yet another page to flag them as unmarried. It's tedious and far from intuitive.

Most just can't be bothered.

Comments

And some people set every parental connection as "Confident" even if there is no evidence.

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I think confident is supposed to mean "the evidence as presented inspires confidence" rather than "I who set the designation am confident about this no matter what anybody else says."

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And remember to look at when the profile was created. Those radio buttons did not exist some years ago and were a feature of a 'new' updated  profile style.