Case Study: Parentage of Richard White of Hutton, born c. 1500

Great work Maven! Thank you.

That's where - and why - I quit back-tracing the White family line. It got too snarled-up for me to want to deal with. :-D

The disinformation is found in "Genesis of the White Family", by Emma Siggins White (wife of John Barber White) - JBW was a passionate but horribly unsystematic (and, I suspect, gullible at best) amateur genealogist, and she seems to have caught the fever from him. The items regarding the purported White-Terrill link are scattered, slapdash, careless, inconsistent, and quite noticeably date-free.

"Genesis" is what I would consider a bad tertiary source - citations of primary sources are very, very few, reliance on secondary sources of unknown and unverified quality is extreme, and everywhere family legend is unquestioningly accepted and reported as fact.

(The post-immigration sections, being of more recent date and with more information available, are better but still not up to modern standards.)

Erica Howton Private User

Pedigrees from the visitation of Hampshire made by Thomas Benolt, Clarenceulx a 1530 ....
http://archive.org/stream/pedigreesfromvis64beno#page/81/mode/1up

The above Visitation lists Richard as the son of Allice Hungerford & John White of Swanborne, he married Maud dau. of Sir Willm. Tirrell of Heron. Their children where Richard (m. Margerett Shirley) Suzan (m. Thom. Tong Clarenceux), Mary (m. _ Whithed, _ Spenser), and Joane (m. _ Wilcocks) White
Richard White & Margarett Sherley are listed as the parents of George White who married Catherine Strowde

The visitations of Essex .....
http://archive.org/stream/visitationsofess13metc#page/321/mode/1up

This also lists Richard White as marrying the dau. of Sir William Tirrell and having children Richard (m. Margarett Stirley/Shirley), etc.

Do you see a problem with me merging the two Richard White's and their wives Terrill?

Richard White, Jr., of Hutton
Sir Richard White, Kt.

Maud White
Wife of Richard White

Yes, I see a TERRIBLE problem. There is about fifty years between the two generations. That simply does not work.

Somebody, somewhere got things all bollixed up.

(Continued) As a matter of fact, the utter biological impossibility is why I created "Richard White 1a" and "NN Terrill" in the first place.

He may be the son of *a* Richard White, and she may be the son of *a* member of the numerous Terrill/Tirrell/Tyrell clan of Essex, maybe even of the Heron subset. But no way she's the daughter of the guy who was killed at the battle of Barnet in 1471, when she MUST have been born after 1480!

Daughter, not son - ack-pthuie!

(counting to 1000, slowly)

I just repeated, in condensed form, what I said in the very first message in this discussion.

Puffing up and faking up glamorous pedigrees is a *very* old practice, and this is a *very* obvious example.

Do. Not. Merge.

As to why Thomas Benolt, Clarenceux Herald, would be inclined to take Sir Richard's pedigree at face value: Sir Richard was in good favor with Henry VIII, and his daughter Susan was a maid of honor to Princess Mary. (This was before Anne Boleyn played all merry heck with court politics.) Under the circumstances, asking too many questions would be rude, if not dangerous.

Or would that be his *sister* Susan? It depends on which Sir Richard we're talking about - one of the problems of repeating the same name too often in the same family.

Anyway, Susan wound up marrying Benolt's successor, Thomas Tonge, hence she was widely known as "Susan Clarenceux".

Reconnected the family lines with the additional Richard White and NN White placed in between the White/Terrill and White/Strelly generations. I'm still not confident about it, especially since the farther back the White line is traced, the more dubious the linkages become. There are probably a few runs of sound linkages, but then they jump off in other directions with no good foundations - White of Somerset to White of York, White of Yeatley/Yatley/Yaxley (in Surrey) spliced onto the York line without explanation, dubious and undocumented linkage from York to London (standing broad jump of three, maybe four undocumented generations), etc.

Most of the possibly-related White lines include in their arms a chevron between three creatures (or creatures' heads) of divers types. The York line has no chevron.

Y-DNA research shows - predictably, from such a common name - multiple male lines running in many different directions.

A further complication is that "Gules, three wolves' heads erased argent, langued and armed azure" properly belongs to Robertson of Struan, of Scotland!

...Removed.

SmartCopyConsistency Check:The age of Maud Terrill White exceeds 125 years.
Sir Richard White, Kt. died before his marriage date.
Richard White, Jr., of Hutton born after the death of his father Sir Richard White, Kt.
.Richard Whyte, II born after the death of his father Sir Richard White, Kt..

Private User, can you come and check this, and tell me how you think it should be Relationship Locked?

No evidence tht Maud White# is the daughter of William Tyrrell. Cutting this relationship first.

Removing her dates and the 1576 marriage date.

Sounds like somebody effed it up after I had sorted it out. This happens ALL TOO OFTEN.

Yep, somebody's been messing around. John White has a Duplicate wife and Duplicate descendants, not to mention jumping up Private a generation too early.

Things like this are why I sometimes despair of Geni ever becoming an even semi-reliable resource - too many people who *think* they know what they're doing, and make royal messes for other people to clean up again and again and again.

Moves, merges, corrections now have the tree back to something like where I left it. No good cutting anybody loose, some damnfool would just reattach them - this has happened too many times.

I'm not sure that Mark White of Timsbury and his brother are of this family, but they'll only get reattached if I cut them.

https://www.geni.com/profile/edit_basics/6000000001831684121 should be "Sir Robert White, KB". See About.

I've never been happy with Margaret Gaynsford's birth date - *very* unlikely it was as early as 1440, though 1450 is possible (and 1450-1460 a reasonable range). Unfortunate that none of her siblings have birth dates either.

cf Sir Robert White, KB

Struggling with HTML tree and finding it slow, clumsy crippleware. Needs a LOT of work before it will compare with the old Adobe Flash version.

Have the duplicates on John White been fixed? I can't see them.

Much better. :-)

Yeah, I merged them all in. As I said, they can't be cut - have to be merged.

I don't work on it - it irritates me :-)

If you're happy with a profile's relationships, post it here and I'll RL it. That shuld go a ong way to keeping it stable.
(Also, put a note in the Spurious Pedigrees project about the bogus genealogy here)

This is one part of the tree I am *very* familiar with - not entirely by choice.

should go a long

Fortunately we seem to have blocked out the worst of the bogus genealogy, i.e. conflating *these* Whites with the Somerset Whites who were John Barber White's *real* ancestors. Only one shadow profile that was a *possible* Somerset White, easily corrected and merged.

Yaay