When the Evidence Doesn’t Make Sense
If you have a pile of records naming a person that you can’t make sense out of, there may be a very good reason for your confusion.
Meet the Sherwoods.
I had a pile of records naming John Sherwood of Connecticut and New York. I even had quite a few records naming both John and his wife Abigail. But I could make sense out of NONE of it. The records just didn’t correlate in a way that made John and Abigail make sense. The dates of the records suggested that they had lived over two hundred years and in two states simultaneously. And Abigail was either John’s wife or mother or perhaps no relation at all.
Until I found the Sherwood genealogy website which gave me a family structure that made sense (and that I would probably not arrived at from the records alone).1
Here’s what that family looked like:
- Abigail Sherwood (1770-1856) was the daughter of one John Sherwood (1731-1777). She also had a brother John Sherwood (1764-1852).
- Abigail’s husband was also named John Sherwood (about 1775-about 1864). He was the son of (yep) yet another John (1740-1825) and Abigail (1753-1829) Sherwood.
- And that John Sherwood (1740-1825) was also was the son of a John Sherwood (1703-1768).
And all of those were unique individuals. Once I had a family structure in place and was able to identify the life spans of each person, I was able to identity which record belonged to which person.
Sometimes it helps to attack your problem from different angles when the evidence isn’t making sense.
Access needs to be requested, but this is an excellent collaborative site. Do your own research to verify the conclusions on the site, however. See https://www.sherwoodgenealogy.org ↩︎