See how Mary Poole and Nicholas Hopkins got invented
http://boards.ancestry.com/surnames.hopkins/5435/mb.ashx
as parents of Stephen Hopkins of the Mayflower.
Hi Charlene:
Thanks for fixing Mary Poley (dau of Anne Wentworth & John Poley).
Back to the mythical Nicholas -- There is no record of his man having ever lived/married/died. No one has a birth, no marriage record and no burial record. If he'd died in London in 1581 there's a BIG chance he would have been listed in a burial record on FamilySearch or on Ancestry or in one of the Parish Records transcriptions available on line. He is nowhere. But he appears in over 500 "submitted genealogies" on FamilySearch. My guess is that the first person who submitted him might have put AFTER 1581 was his birth date since that's when Stephen of the Mayflower was baptized (in Hampshire). But not to be bothered with extra words the next person submitted it without the word after and thus it became that Nicholas Hopkins died 1581 (even though there is no record of him anywhere else).
Has anyone found any trace of him in Norfolk?
He's a hold-over from the goofy book that reported the invention of a marriage of him to a Mary Poole. The real Mary Poole as clearly described in the book (sister of Giles Poole) married Edward Baynard and died childless before 1536 (before the mythical Nicholas was even born).
There was a Nicholas Hopkins in Gloucestershire but he didn't marry Mary Poole either.
There is no William Thomas Hopkins because Commoners commonly didn't have middle names back then. It's hard to find them. None of the Pilgrims did. Only 3 men who signed the Declaration of Independence did.
Most of these errors were copied off LDS and the usual "Confirmed Matches" are wrong. Some highlights to those above:
-- There is no Damaris born 1564 who married Shattuck.
-- There is no Mary (Shattuck) (born Poole)
The wife of one of the invented kids has a father named "Baseline Wheldon". Straight off LDS IGIs where Katherine (not Agnes) changed husbands 2 times after her original error. We tracked her back when LDS posted the codes for the submittal dates for the "contributed" IGI files.
Wife of another son William shown as Mary Hopkins (Andrews) born abt 1598 in Farmington, Hartford, Connecticut, United States (only 22 years before the Pilgrims arrived).
Thanks.
Shirley
