New Wild Goose Chase Part I

Brick walls.  We all have them among our ancestors.  Wilson Parker Sr. is mine and, if you are reading this, maybe yours too.

According to the 1880 U.S. Census for Tainter, Dunn, Wisconsin, Mary Ann Belle (Parker) Harrington's father was born in Pennsylvania.  What kind of evidence is this?  It is tantamount to the children's game of "telephone."  What begins as one statement often transforms into a completely different statement on the other end of the line.  In our particular case, the results are particularly dubious because the birth information provided for Mary Ann Belle's husband's parents - a known data set - is incorrect.  The 1880 census indicates William C.D. Harrington's parents were both born in England when, in fact, neither his mother nor his father were born in England!  (The person who provided the information to the census taker may not have been a member of the family.)

The information in this census serves as a perfect illustration of why census results in general should be taken with a grain of salt, especially when they refer to events far removed in time from the actual census date (nearly 100 years in the case of Wilson Parker's birth).  In truth, the same is true of any data the family researcher may come across and is not limited to the U.S. Census.

Aside
Speaking of grains of salt, its, many times, far easier to prove a given statement by contradiction than by a direct attack.  In other words, one looks to prove a statement that would lead to a logical contradiction, such as ".... Therefore, Henry Jones was born in the town of Duxbury in Massachusetts and Henry Jones was born in the town of Westmoreland in New Hampshire," a logical impossibility if one is talking about a unique individual, thus proving the statement contrary to one set out to prove true.

To simplify matters, such a "proof" looks something like this:

Suppose A is true [where "not A"=B]...

Then C and D are true.

But C and D cannot both be true.

Therefore, "not A."

Thus B is true.

The argument by contradiction, despite its seemingly unnecessary mental gymnastics in the eyes of those not versed in philosophical logic or mathematical proof, is, in practice, quite simple to construct... in most cases.  End aside.