Temperence Hull & Elizabeth Bickford: 52 Ancestors 2020 Prompt “Oops”

Not Cousins After All: My Friend’s Erroneous Connection to My Family Tree

My friend Pat and I were very excited when we discovered last winter that we were related—very, very distantly (ninth cousins), but still it took us by surprise. The lead seemed so promising, but now actual research has called the connection into doubt.

We were using a FamilySearch app function called Relatives Around Me. When you turn on the app, it checks people near you who also have the app open, comparing your FamilySearch family trees. It identifies any connections between those family trees. If the app finds a cousin in the room, it then shows you and your new cousin the common ancestor you are descended from, and the two lines of descendants leading down from that ancestor to the two of you.

According to the app, Pat and I shared a common male ancestor named Joseph Hull. We descended from two of Joseph’s daughters. On my side of the tree, I descended from Joseph’s daughter Naomi. Pat supposedly descended from Naomi’s half-sister Temperence.

At the time we used the app in December 2019, neither of us had traced our lineage back far enough to find the Hulls in our trees. We decided to treat this connection as a research challenge to verify or debunk. I was able to verify that Joseph Hull is indeed my tenth-great-grandfather—tracing this lineage helped me to break through a brick wall at the level of my fourth-great-grandmother, which was exciting. In addition, the Hull family was also incredibly interesting, and I discovered that Joseph was one of my earliest ancestors to move to colonial America.

Like me, Pat had a brick wall to deal with lower in the tree. I decided to try to trace our cousinship from the top down, starting with Joseph Hull and his daughter Temperence, working down to Pat’s Smyer ancestors.

I was able to verify that Joseph’s daughter Temperence married John Bickford in 1649. The couple had several children, including Elizabeth Bickford, the next link in Pat’s lineage. Elizabeth was born in Durham, New Hampshire in 1652. She married Joseph Smith in 1668 when she was about 16 years of age. She died May 25, 1727. She and Joseph had several children.

Unfortunately, there don’t seem to be any real records of the names and birthdates of those children on Ancestry. Supposedly, they had a daughter named Elizabeth. There are a few Elizabeth Smiths on Ancestry from the Durham area, but they don’t seem to match up with any children Joseph and Elizabeth Smith may have had. One possibility was born in 1712, when Elizabeth Bickford Smith was 60 years old. This seems unlikely in the extreme.

FamilySearch records are even worse. John and Elizabeth Smith are shown as having ten children, including two Marys and three Elizabeths. Of course, parents could always name new babies after deceased siblings, but none of the earlier children had died before the new siblings were born. In addition, the birth dates are ridiculous. The first Mary Smith is listed as being born in 1664 when her supposed mother Elizabeth Bickford was only six years old. Oops.

The first Elizabeth is shown as being born in 1672 and dying in 1747. She is listed as marrying Samuel Chesley of Dover, New Hampshire, which is in the same county as Durham where the Smith parents are living. This seems like the most likely daughter of Elizabeth Bickford.

The second Elizabeth is shown as being born in 1678 and dying in 1708. She is listed as marrying Jonathan Arnold from the town of Haddam in Hartford County, Connecticut. This location is over 180 miles from the Smith home in Durham. How would Elizabeth have met her future husband? This seems an unlikely match. Oops again.

And the final Elizabeth was born in 1687 and died in 1720. She married Peter Moon of St. Peter’s Parish, New Kent County, Virginia. This is the most ludicrous possibility of the three, as St. Peter’s Parish is 622 miles from Durham, an impossible journey by land in seventeenth century colonial America. Even by ship this was a long and probably expensive voyage. It boggles the mind that a Virginia man would have married a New Hampshire woman in 1709. The appears to be an even bigger oops.

Elizabeth No. 3 is the Elizabeth Smith that my friend is indeed descended from, but her likely parents were not Elizabeth Bickford and John Smith. My search on Ancestry shows that the Elizabeth Smith who married Peter Moon was born in Virginia, and cannot be the child of the Smith family of Durham.

This is an example of why I have issues with information I find on FamilySearch. As a Wiki, FamilySearch trees are at the mercy of the novice researcher, who doesn’t even realize that it is extremely unlikely and probably impossible that a single family would have three daughters in the household at the same time, all with the name Elizabeth, and that it is unlikely that a young woman would travel in 1709 for no discernible reason to a colony over 600 miles from her home and family and marry some strange man there. I expect that further research will reveal the true parentage of Elizabeth Smith Moon, and that those Smiths will have been long-term residents of Virginia.

Sadly, the 9^th cousin connection between my friend Pat and me appears to have been a giant “oops”. Lucky for us, we also connected as 11th cousins through a different mutual ancestor. Let’s hope that link will prove to be verifiable and accurate.