James Maxwell - James Maxwell's second wife

Started by Private User on Tuesday, September 28, 2021
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Private User
9/28/2021 at 9:28 AM

Your Family Search citation also includes his marriage to Dorcas Stone . Check out :

James Maxwell

Might these two people be the same James Maxwell?

Private User
9/28/2021 at 10:57 AM

While it's true that James Maxwell married both women, his parents and siblings are unknown. It seems especially unlikely that he, the purported eldest son in his family, would wind up a leather-worker in Boston if his father was a Scottish military officer and his brother was a baronet. Looks like this was someone's attempt to make a humble ancestor into a noble one...it happens!

So I'll merge them, but I'm cutting the parents and siblings.

Private User
9/28/2021 at 11:02 AM

We're now showing John Maxwell and Jane Scott as his parents...but again, we need evidence for that. Neither profile has any.

Private User
9/28/2021 at 11:13 AM

We now need to clean up the children who are attached. I believe James, for example, died childless (and his older brother James died in infancy), but we're showing him as married with several children...and dying the same day as his father.

My experience with the Maxwells is that people rely too heavily on second- and third-hand info gathered by Ezra Stiles, and not enough on what the records say. Or they rely on Cutter, who got basic facts about James Maxwell wrong. The whole concept of Maxwell having a third wife originates with Stiles, for example...but if you actually read Stiles, he says that the woman who told him the story of the third wife, after Maxwell's death no less, admitted that she wasn't sure about any of it.

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