RCA, or Robert Charles Anderson, sometimes known simply as Bob, is the head and lead writer of the Great Migration Project. If you have 17th century New England ancestors, you need this series. If Donald Lines Jacobus is the dean of American genealogy and anchors the early 20th century in scholarship, Bob Anderson is the anchor at the end of 20th and beginning of the 21st century.
My next article will be in the April issue of the New England Historical & Genealogical Register. It is a short article that looks at the evidence that the man William Reynolds of the Plymouth Colony in the 1630s is the same man in Maine in the 1650s to 1670s. I have to painfully note that Bob Anderson did not include a full sketch of William Reynolds in the Great Migration due to lack of evidence that he was, in fact, this person.
Bob is like a great college professor who, no matter how hard you work on your paper, gives you a B+ because he says you can do better. I have five ancestors that appear in the Great Migration volumes thus far which Bob has pruned to my great dismay. I have relied on very solid secondary sources for these ancestors, but despite using Jacobus, Holman, or Pope, Anderson says: go back to the primary sources and make the case. The evidence still isn't there. So that's what I do. Other than William Reynolds we have:
1. William Holmes of Marshfield [The Great Migration: Immigrants to New England 1634-1635 (NEHGS, Boston, 2003), Vol. III: 392-7]. I corrected the fact that his daughter Sarah is the woman who married the Rev. Samuel Arnold. See: NEHGR 145 (1991):374. That was just an oversight.
2. Edward Bangs' second wife as Rebecca (---) not Hobart. I rely on two great works: N.G. Parke II & D.L. Jacobus,The Ancestry of Lorenzo Ackley and His Wife Emma Arabella Bosworth (1960) and Mary Walton Ferris, Dawes-Gates Ancestral Lines vol. 1 (1943) and vol. 2 (1931), but Anderson says there's no proof for such an assertion.
3. John-2 Hall's wife as Priscilla (---) not Bearse. Again, relying upon Jacobus in Ancestry of Thomas Chalmers Brainerd by Thomas C. Brainerd, ed. by Donald Lines Jacobus (Montreal, 1948), but Anderson notes that this identification lacks proof. For those who've read my posts on Austin Bearse's supposed Indian wife, that may be a moot point for me, if I can't prove the generation before it!
4. John Pope of Dorchester. This was a gift, since Anderson ably distinguishes this John Pope from another contemporary John Pope confused by A History of the Dorchester Pope Family 1634-1888 by Charles Henry Pope (Boston, 1888).
So I really need to start analyzing problems nos. 2 and 3 in the near future. Until then, I await the next volume of the Great Migration.
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