Witches, Records, Stories, and Lies

I ran across again a story that appeared very believable that one of my ancestors was tried as a witch in England. A number of apparent sources were provided and various other bits of information about my ancestors. Since I try to prove what I put in my tree, I looked into his sources and could find none of them. So I looked further and discovered that apparently someone had made up a lot of events about this ancestor, his parents, his early life in Virginia that has been propagated into almost every family tree involving this person, but apparently no one else can prove what he wrote!

So I started thinking more about proof. The point of genealogy is to investigate your own ancestors and relatives. That is the reason you don’t just take a day to copy a tree and call it done, but try to find evidence for every fact that you are presenting.

Evidence comes in various forms, and I will summarize them as records, stories, and lies.

Records

Records are things like birth, marriage, death, and census records. If available, they can give you a lot of information about your family, but very often hard evidence is difficult to find. No type of record is foolproof, so one tries to find a variety of pieces of evidence. Mistakes are made in birth, death, and census records. Family records such as Bible records also can contain errors (or errors in transcription). But in the end, records are the mainstay of genealogy.

Stories

Stories add the spice to the birth, marriage, death and census records. Obviously I love stories because that is what this blog is mostly about… My opinion of family stories, and many stories told in books and elsewhere, are that they are usually based on fact, but there is room for error in them, as well as exaggeration. Errors I’ve seen are often in which generation the events occurred in (especially difficult if John is son of John is son of John..). I love stories, but I try to find confirming evidence for them.

Then there are lies, which is really the subject of today’s post.

Lies, or “fraudulent genealogies”

“Armchair historians, family-tree climbers, and professionals are all among the guilty. Many are well-meaning folk who “just got carried away” by imagination, enthusiasm, or inexperience. Others are, yes, quite calculating in their deceit.”¹

Complaints about quality is not new. This book, published in 1897, lists American genealogy books, notes in the preface:

” Many of the volumes here catalogued are of rare excellence both in contents and manufacture, whilst others, although well-intended efforts, show a lack of genealogical ability and a surprising preponderance of credulity, especially where an attempt is made to connect the family written about with some ancient English house. “²

So there are not only unintentional errors or too much “enthusiasm” to connect to important people, there are also forgeries, fakes, and frauds. I’m going to break “lies” into two categories. The first is just requires creativity and imagination… Nothing is fraudulent except the connections between generations.

You hire someone to build your tree and they come back and proclaim that you are descended from many famous people! Wow! I look at the public tree on familysearch.com and wow! I’m descended from lots of famous people. But wait, when I look closer, there is no evidence, no proof, no sources.

Let’s take my ancestor Samuel Crowley. From various sources I can conclude that he was probably born about 1741 in Virginia. A Samuel Crowley is named in the will of Jeffrey Crowley, proved 18 Feb 1762 in Halifax County, Virginia. Jeffrey was born about 1702 in England based his marriage record in Virginia. Being named in a will is pretty good proof of parentage.

But wait, familysearch has Samuel’s father as a Jeremiah Crowley. There are no sources (evidence) provided to prove that Jeremiah Crowley is the father of our Samuel Crowley. Oh, look, a couple generations more and we have a Sir Ambrose Crowley III, and Sir Robert Needham Viscount of Kilmorey High Sheriff of Shropshire, and Lords and Ladies galore going way back. One of the lines went back to Pons Pontius Fitzsimon (1040-1090).

Well, here I am with Jeffrey Crowley, based on his will in Virginia naming his son Samuel. In most cases I cannot make the jump from Virginia to wherever they came from, but in this case there is a Jeffrey Crowley born in England at the right time. A Jeffrey Crowley was baptised on 9 March 1702 in Kinwarton, Warwickshire, England. The baptismal record reports that “Jeffrey the base son of Agnes Crowley”. Base son is illegitimate son. Many researchers guess that Jeffrey’s father is a man in the household where Agnes works, whose name is Jeffrey… Agnes named her son after its father.. This seems to be a very believable couple of steps, but not completely proven (most things aren’t).

So is Jeffrey a descendant of Pons Pontius Fitzsimon (1040-1090) or an illegitimate child of a servant?

There are several possible parents favored by the people serious about solving the problem of the father of Jeffrey, and none of them are the Jeremiah Crowley that is listed as his father on familysearch.com. Although I can’t prove it, I do have Agnes Crowley as his mother and Jeffrey Hopkins (from the big house) as his father. But no lords and ladies… just an illegitimate child whose father possibly lived in a big house…

If you read this blog, you have met Samuel Crowley before. He was killed in the Battle of Point Pleasant, the first battle of the Revolutionary War, on 10 October 1774.

Not everything in my tree has been proven to my satisfaction, but I do record what evidence I have in what is called sources. It is very easy to build trees that lead to lots of (imaginary) lords and ladies, and even kings and queens! It is much more difficult to find the real parents…

Now the next set of lies are actual made up lies.

This I believe is the case with Kathryn Garner, potentially a witch… She might be my ancestor, but no one has found any evidence she or any other accused witches were “tested” in Shrewsbury around that time. There are other bits of this story that are similarly unprovable, but not as important… The apparent purpose of this story is to explain the missing wife of Richard and mother of John, with added “spice”…

Below is only one of a number of articles that Patrick Garner has written about the stories made up about this family as he tried to track down the “evidence” presented for the various pronouncements about the Garner family. This one is about the claim that Kathryn was tried as a witch in Shropshire.

Kathryn Garner witch trial: fact or legend?
“In conclusion, there appears to be no surviving court documents pertaining to Shropshire to substantiate this story. … The story of Kathryn Garner’s 1636 trial and death would certainly explain a lot, if true, but at present it must be considered an unsubstantiated family legend.”

I disagree with Patrick Garner calling this a “family legend”. I see no evidence that this is anything but a made-up story. It may have become “family legend” by being copied so many times, but to me a “family legend” is a story told by the family about the family and presumably based on knowledge some time in the past. And family stories do not come with fake official document numbers, explanations of what libraries the information was found in, etc.

What have we learned? Don’t believe anything you can’t prove to your satisfaction. Follow up on sources people provide. This charlatan made up sources that just are not findable. And this was not the only story he told about this family that no one can find the evidence for what he claimed.

I guess I should not have been, but I was shocked at these apparent lies, which included fake proofs that cannot be found… I should add that this story is included in almost every tree I find that includes Richard and John Garner. So temping almost believable lies can spread like wildfire!

Additional Reading:

Over 3,000 Years of Humans Exaggerating Their Lineage on Family Trees

Genealogy is an auxiliary discipline in history that studies the origin and descent of families and strains (lineages) to draw a map of biological links and affinity between different individuals and generations. Genealogists use historical records, oral interviews, genetic analysis and secondary sources (treaties) to build family trees.

Don’t Be Gullible: Being Aware of Genealogical Fraud

Fakelore or pseudo-folklore is inauthentic, manufactured folklore presented as if it were genuinely traditional. The term can refer to new stories or songs made up, or to folklore that is reworked and modified for modern tastes.

John Garner Biography
Discusses the falsified information and fabrications about John Garner and his proposed parents as well as what is actually known about John Garner.
“A Garner descendent and “researcher” in 1991, who has been identified, appears to have found the noted Sept 1634 Shropshire baptism record and the 1637 arrival record (a Richard and a John, as noted in the following). For reasons unclear to me, he then set about doing a great disservice to all serious research by creating a total of four falsified records, with fictional references, to “prove” that this was our John Garner, those since spreading across the internet, largely accepted without serious question, and amazingly, the entire fiction actually expanded upon by others, including a speculative narrative that Katharn was accused solely due to a family dispute over ownership of the Lion Inn. When these fabrications are appropriately removed from the timeline, any case for the Richard and Katharn of Shropshire as our John Garner’s parents is actually probably the weakest of available possible speculations. Without any confirmation of either a date or location, a birth year of “abt 1635” is the best estimate based on his deposition of 1665 (noted in a following section), and “England” as his birth location, but remains speculative and the VA colony a viable alternate.”

1. Gary B. Mills and Elizabeth Shown Mills, “Hoodwinks, Tomfoolery, and Fakelore,” National Genealogical Society Quarterly 87 (1999): p 259.
2. A List of Some American Genealogies Which Have Been Printed in Book Form by Glenn, Thomas Allen (1897) Philadelphia, H. T. Coates & Company. Available from archive.org