You can’t always trust what you read. Especially with genealogy where new records and information are coming out all the time. In this case, I had to refute information that was published in more than one book – both genealogical books and history books of the area in Nova Scotia.
Because genealogy records are constantly becoming available even records that have been carefully researched may only be accurate to the time they were completed. My own work is included in this, so if you find more information, by all means let me know.
I was doing some research on the loyalist line of my 1C1R and ran into a problem. Samuel Meek Senior who died in 1846 had left a wonderful will listing all of his children that were alive and a few of his grandchildren. He left Samuel, son on William, three ewe lambs. He gave each of his other grandchildren named Samuel or Bathsheba one ewe lamb – telling us that he had more than one grandchild named Samuel. He also left Winnifred and Bathsheba, daughters of William, his bedding.
That was good news to me, as I was working on the hypothesis that our Samuel was the son of William.
Our Samuel was married to Eliza Mary Beach and the father of Richard Marshall Meek. I had no documents to establish his birth, death or marriage, except the death notice in the newspaper in 1898 confirming he was a United Empire Loyalist descendant. This put him to be born in approximately 1814.
The first wrong Samuel
The problem was that the published books had Samuel Meek, who married Bessie Dimock, was the son of William. I call him the Samuelx1.
First, I wanted to established that Samuelx1 had not lived in Canning, Kings County. Starting backwards from the 1891 census, we can see the age of our Samuel on the census approximately matches our Samuel. Samuelx1 would have been about 20 years younger.
Going back further through the censuses, the age was confirmed right back to the 1951 census still in Kings County.
As these all connected to our Samuel, it appears that Samuelx1 never lived in Kings County. I then checked the censuses for Rawdon County and found Samuelx1 living there in 1871 with his wife Bessie on the same farm as John and Eliza. This would give the impression that there was a strong family relationship with John and Eliza. This was confirmed by the 1891 census where Eliza was listed as John’s mother.
To be 100% sure I ordered Samelx1’s death certificate from Belmont, Massachusetts.
The second wrong Samuel
This confirmed that his father was John, not William. However, this lead to another problem as the published records had a different Samuel as being the son of John. That Samuel, we’ll call him Samuelx2, had married Clara Curtis.
With a child named “Bordman” that gave us a great place to start. Always have to love unusual names when your are doing genealogy reserach. Bordman died in 1930 and his parents are listed as Samuel E. and Caroline.
Checking on another of the listed children, Stephen Curtis was born in 1870 and his parents were Samuel Edmund Meek and Carrie E Curtis. The name of Samuelx3’s wife was most likely Caroline or Carrie, but she has definitely been referred to as Clara in some documents.
On the 1871 census, we can find Samuelx2 living with Clara, Bordman and Stephen, among others. They are living with Stephen Meek. As mentioned before, while not definitive, it is normally an indication of a close familial relationship.
The death record for Edmund Samuel Meek in 1898 in Peabody, Massachusetts, confirmed that Samuelx2’s father was indeed Stephen.
The Samuel grandchildren
Other information, that I won’t go into here, confirmed that none of the others sons of Samuel Senior had children named Samuel. I am able to therefore confirm that there were three grandchildren named Samuel and that our Samuel is the son of William.
Published genealogy records are like any other genealogy records. They can be used, but must be verified by other sources.
For this project, I was happy, our Samuel could be connected where I thought he should be connected.
