On Sat, 23 Mar 2002 09:55:35 EST, [email protected] wrote: :Thanks for the infomation on Grace. But I am sorry to hear now :that the information I have, is probably not correct. First, what do you have? Why not share it? (See my concluding paragraph.) Every few months we revisit the topic of unverifiable sources vis a vis Brooks founders. Each of us who descends from Henry or Thomas Brooks would like to know the origins of these presumed brothers. It's awfully tempting to yield to the siren call of websites cooing, "Quick answers -- paste me!" There are so many of them that they *must* be right, right? Wanting something to be true doesn't make it true. Consider: (1) "Grace wife of Thomas Brooke died 12 may 1664:" [Concord VR, page 11] (2) Joshua, Thomas's eldest son, named his 2d daughter Grace after his mother (he named his firstborn daughter after his wife) [Concord VR, 9] (3) There is no known use of the name Grace among descendants of Henry Brooks for 5 generations (until bestowed on a baby girl in New London, 1743) [my own research] (4) Henry's marital life is accounted for. At the time of Grace's death at Concord, Henry was living with his 2d wife Susanna Bradford at Woburn [vital records, wills, deeds, probate, and numerous secondary analyses cited in last evening's post] It's clear that Thomas Brooks of Concord was married to a Grace, but no marriage record has been found in Massachusetts or in England, nor any English baptismal record for their children. Among those who have looked are Savage, Lemuel Shattuck (historian of Concord and founder of the New England Historical Genealogical Society), William Gray Brooks (father of Rev. Phillips Brooks, and a lifelong genealogist), John Brooks Threlfall, the most knowledgeable person living on Thomas Brooks, and even not-so-famous-but-equally-dedicated Shepherd Brooks of Cambridge, MA, who was over in Suffolk looking in the mid-90s. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Steps such as combing Boyd's Index are really last-straw measures, because everything that's indexed in Boyd has been combed multiple times before for Thomas and Henry. For William and Gilbert of Scituate, MA, the odds are better of finding something, because less research has been published on them. The number of English emigrants to New England between 1629 and 1640 is variously estimated at 21,000 to 40,000. Banks, who spent five years researching in England, estimated in "Planters of the Commonwealth" that he had identified only 40% of these emigrants. I suspect the authors of the Great Migration series, the definitive study now coming out, will lower that percentage. The odds, then, are substantially less than 50-50 that any Englishman of that period can be documented. Most Englishmen of that day will be forever anonymous. So the thorough but stymied historian proceeds to search for contemporaneous records of other events which might have involved Thomas or Grace Brooks. Emigration? Not found. Will? Thomas died intestate, and no will is found for Grace. Probate? That tomb has already been found and looted ... Thomas's probate was first dug up and published way back in 1860 [Bond's Watertown Genealogies]. Gravestone? None this old survives in Concord, nor did they when Concord's vitals and cemetery inscriptions were compiled and published in the 1890s. My own to-do list for Thomas and Grace still includes checking published church, land, town, and General Court records. When those are exhausted I will of necessity conclude that we know all we are going to know. At the least I am certain that more deeds can be mined, and a list compiled of references to Thomas in General Court records. I won't be looking for answers in the Ancestral File, or among the believer-submissions in the IGI, or online at any site that doesn't cite contemporaneous evidence. :-) To anyone who isn't a Brooks, it's just another collateral name, often some obscure spouse who married in, and not worth a lot of time and effort. The purpose of this list, on the other hand, is to give the BROOKS surname the "spotlight treatment" -- that is, the gravitas and evidentiary analysis that any surname deserves when studied in its own right. I'll cite a favorite example of scholarly research. Steve and Jennie Hoffman, subscribers to this list in Whitchurch, Hampshire, England, perhaps two years back submitted several research findings which can be found in the list archive. One of their posts, documenting the Brooke family of Whitchurch, killed and buried the "William of Whitechurch" ancestral canard (which is found about as frequently online as the marriage of Henry and Grace). In another post, they looked at the common assignment of Grace's surname as WHEELER, examining Wheeler births and baptisms in Cranfield, Bedfordshire. (That's the ancestral home of the many Wheelers who emigrated to Concord, including the son-in-law of Thomas Brooks.) No Grace Wheeler is found at Cranfield, and I write her as Grace ?Wheeler because the surname is demonstrably unproven. Thanks to Steve and Jennie, we know these facts authoritatively, not because we found them on the internet, but because someone we can contact looked in a thorough and organized manner in the appropriate places. Their methodology, in turn, allows a firm conclusion to be drawn and the evidence to be revisited if necessary. The process and analysis are replicable. Personally, I have no monopoly on truth, evidence or good judgement. I've been spectacularly wrong many times. :-) Like each of you, I'll bet, I've got far more IGI citations ("or clues," as we genteely call them) in my database than I'd like, or notations like "source unreported." We're all just trying to find the best information and evidence we can. But Data Rules!, or at least it should. Before I climb down off my soapbox, I will urge any reader with new information or a related question about Thomas, Grace and Henry to post it here. Don't be shy, intimidated or discouraged. The important thing is not to "be right," but to "get it right." Chris