It can be so tempting to take those names off an online tree and incorporate them into yours, adding to the ancestral harvest as many names as quickly as possible.

But there’s a reason that should not be done.

There are numerous online trees that indicate that Richard Silvester, who was living in Marshfield, Massachusetts, when he died in 1663, was married to Naomi Torrey. A lot of trees. A handful indicate that Richard’s wife was named Naomi with no last name given.

In a 1931 article in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register, Albert Henry Silvester, writes at length about Richard. In two separate places he references the claim that Naomi was a Torrey and says that “no record of such a marriage, however, has been found.”

It is possible that a document or record has been discovered since the 1931 article has been published. It is possible that a series of records have been analyzed that that they make an indirect case for the Torrey connection.

What this article suggests that I need to do is:

• Not use Torrey as Naomi’s maiden name
• Search for later articles that may address the maiden name of Richard Silvester’s wife
• Search for contemporary documents (land, court, etc.) that may provide indirect evidence of Richard’s wife’s maiden name.

What I should not do is:

• copy down everything I see
• use information from online trees without confirming it
• rely only on older articles– there maybe more current scholarship on the family, but older articles can sometimes help researchers trace where certain misconceptions originated.