Lydia Leonard (White) - Who is her mother?

Ben M Angel found documentation indicating that not only is Lydia White Leonard *not* related to Sir Richard White of Hutton, she probably wasn't the person whom Thomas Leonard married (if he married anybody, which is in some doubt).

So please stop trying to add her back on!

There is a huge push to merge in duplicates Maven.

I suggest that Ben create, MP and lock "Unknown Father of Lydia White" and "Unknown Mother of Lydia White". That is the best solution.

And if he did not marry, then he should disconnect her and lock Thomas Leonard.

Don't assume that people are intentionally doing sabotage, it's more likely due to how Geni's tools work. People create duplicates and unless the curator takes some steps to prevent contact bad duplicates being merged in / connected, it will just happen over and over.

He already DID that once. Somebody got around it by merging a duplicate - and erroneous - profile for Sir Richard White III.

I'm not assuming sabotage, just laziness and carelessness. They can't be bothered to check what they're merging into, they just go ahead and *do* it. And sometimes it's totally the wrong thing to do.

I did several merges into this family, and I assure you that I am neither lazy nor careless.

The bottom line is that we have scores of duplicate trees every month and we try to merge them in. Sometimes others propose the merge and it cannot be undone.

To avoid the situation that is bothering you, some actions need to be taken by Ben or another curator. I sent him a link to this discussion by Geni mail, so he knows what has to be done.

(1) Where the parents are UNKNOWN, the best way to prevent the same erroneous parents to be merged in over and over is to create unknown parents and MP and lock them

(2) where the person did not marry but people keep merging in duplicates that have spouses, again the best thing to do is lock the profile so the person who curates it and has done the research has to intentionally do the merge

Otherwise someone will complete merges that re-add the erroneous information

Oh and there should be succinct curator notes saying "WAS NOT MARRIED" on Thomas and "PARENTS UNKNOWN" on Lydia.

What about the children? Who do they belong to? Why are they still there if Ben has researched this and concluded that Thomas was not married. Each of them also has to be addressed.

Lots of bad merges happen. The trick is to prevent them altogether.

If the unknown parent profile is a locked MP, the curator has to accept the merge, so the duplicate Richard White would not have been merged in.

There has been a *lot* of trouble with the various White lines, because there is an awful lot of disinformation about them. :-( The worst of it comes from a nearly-worthless book, "Genesis of the White Family", by Emma Siggins White - she ransacked English history for prominent Whites to shove into her husband's family tree (which to the extent that it can be reconstructed shows a long line of Somerset yeomen). But to this day people think she knew what she was doing - well, maybe she did, but it was every bit as dishonest as anything by Gustave Anjou!

Believe me, I spend hours each month getting rid of bad information coming in from profiles merged in. Even without bad book sources, there are plenty of incorrect family trees on the Internet. The trick with these historical lines is to get them MPed, add reliable sources using the Source Tab, and make sure the About Me and the Curator's Notes are accurate and helpful.

I lock a lot of historical profiles to prevent bad merges over and over. I am happy to unlock if someone has good, additional information but it needs to meet my reliability test.

Most of my irritation actually is at Emma Siggins White and those who take her work as gospel. She was really slick, and could probably have given Gustave Anjou pointers on pedigree fakery. :-P

Ben is disentangling Lydia and other related messes, as best he can with what little free time he has. We're trying to sort some ill-assorted people back into the family lines they properly (or probably) belong to. Some of it involves undoing Emma's meddling, and some is just confusion.

No, I don't think she's the daughter of Charles White and Alice Warburton either. Hasn't anybody noticed that Charles was born in 1573 (making him 6 years old when Lydia was supposedly born), and Alice wasn't even born until 1580?

Can you say: BOGUS!