I recently found in Amos B. Carpenter (hereafter ABC), _A Genealogical History of the Rehoboth Branch of the Carpenter Family in America_ (1898), another cluster of errors that have been uncritically accepted and repeated by virtually everyone who has posted anything online about the family in question. BENJAMIN4 CARPENTER (William3-1) was born at Rehoboth, Mass., 20 October 1663; he migrated to Northampton, Mass., where on 4 March 1691 he married HANNAH STRONG, daughter of Jedediah and Freedom (Woodward) Strong (Rehoboth VR, 1:9; NEHGR 8[1854]:180, 182, and 23[1869]:294-95). Among the children born to them at Northampton (in 1708 or 1709 they settled in Coventry, Conn.) was JEDEDIAH5 CARPENTER, born 1 October 1697 (Susan Whitney Dimock, _Births, Marriages, Baptisms and Deaths from the Records of the Town and Churches in Coventry, Connecticut, 1711-1844_ [1897], 19). The first seven of their children recorded at Coventry had been born at Northampton. They probably appear in Northampton records as well, but I have not looked for them). This much about Jedediah (birth place/date and parentage)--along with the likelihood that he had among his children a son Daniel--ABC gets right (see _Rehoboth Carpenter Family_, 65, 96-97). He also says, however, that this Jedediah Carpenter married at Rehoboth, Mass., on 24 May 1725, Mary Brown, with whom he had five children--Amy, Rebecca, Caleb, Patience, and Daniel--and that he died at Rehoboth on 15 December 1731 (ibid.). ABC gives precise birth dates between 1726 and 1732 for the first four children, estimates Daniel's birth year as "about 1727," and says all were born at Rehoboth At the end of his account of the children, ABC says that "[t]here is some doubt in the compiler's mind in regard to the foregoing Daniel belonging to this family. He has no authority at hand to verify the record, though the statement is probably correct." The "doubt in the compiler's mind" was well founded--not because Daniel fails to fit with this family, but because the family (except for Daniel) fails to fit with this Jedediah Carpenter. As above, all that is correct in what ABC says about him is that he was born at Northampton, 1 October 1697, the son of Benjamin and Hannah [Strong] Carpenter, and probably had a son Daniel. The Jedediah Carpenter who married Mercy/Marcy/Mary Brown (of Barrington, Mass. [now R.I.]); had children Amy, Rebecca, Caleb, and Patience; and died at Rehoboth in 1731 is a different man. Jedediah Carpenter of Rehoboth never lived anywhere else: he was born there on 15 December 1696, the son of Samuel and Patience (Ide) Carpenter (see Rehoboth Vital Records, 1:48, 56, 2:65, 144, 241). ABC lists him among Samuel and Patience Carpenter's children but gives no information about him except his birth date (see _Rehoboth Carpenter Family_, 78). The following children of Benjamin and Hannah (Strong) Carpenter's son Jedediah were baptized in Bolton, Conn. (adjacent to Coventry): Joel, 10 Dec. 1727; Ruth, 4 Jan. 1730; Nathan, 2 April 1732; Samuel, 28 July 1734; Dorcas, 22 Feb. 1736; and Ezekiel, 25 June 1738; their mother's name is not given ("A Copy of the Records of the Rev. Thomas White, the First Pastor of the Church in Bolton, Conn.," NEHGR 52[1898]:180-85). Although Daniel is not on this list, the Bolton church was not formed until October 1725, and Jedediah--aged 30 when son Joel (first on the above list) was baptized, in 1727--probably had several older children. There is other, stronger circumstantial evidence that this Jedediah had a son Daniel, but it goes beyond the scope of this posting. Suffice it to say that the first child of Jedediah's probable son Daniel was born to his wife Elizabeth ______ at Coventry in 1751 (see _Rehoboth Carpenter Family_, 177; primary source probably Coventry VR). It is thus probable that Daniel was older than all the children listed above and was born no later than 1725. (ABC's estimate of Daniel's birth year ["about 1727"] is of course based on Rehoboth Jedediah's dates of marriage and death and the birth dates of his children--Amy, Rebecca, Caleb, and Patience. Since they were born at regular, two-year intervals, squeezing Daniel in at "about 1727" was the best ABC could do. But since these were not Daniel's siblings, we can dismiss this estimate altogether.) On 10 March 1777 Jedediah Carpenter sold 33 acres with a dwelling house at Coventry; son Nathan (see above) was one of the witnesses (Coventry Deeds, 6:309). It was probably about this time that Jedediah moved to Stafford, Conn., where he died on 2 March 1781 (Barbour Collection, citing Stafford VR, 2:177); the otherwise unidentified "widow Carpenter" died there on 9 January 1784, aged 84 (Stafford Church Records, 69). The data and sources cited above are sufficient to validate the distinction between Benjamin and Hannah (Strong) Carpenter's son Jedediah, on the one hand, and Samuel and Patience (Ide) Carpenter's son Jedediah, on the other. They do not, however, represent thorough research of land, probate, church, cemetery, and other records of Coventry and vicinity or Stafford. Such research (which I do not plan to undertake) will undoubtedly add precision and breadth to the former Jedediah's biography and perhaps identify his wife and provide direct, documentary evidence of more children (including Daniel) than the six baptized at Bolton. That Coventry/Stafford Jedediah and Rehoboth Jedediah were the same man was unlikely on its face: What are the odds that a young man born in western Massachusetts, who had moved with his family to central Connecticut, would migrate northeastward, back to the town of his father's birth--the son had no direct connection to Rehoboth and no inheritance there--when population pressures and soil depletion were pushing people westward? But even if the online repeaters of ABC's inaccuracies failed to see this scenario as deserving of further investigation, one would have thought that at least a few might observe standard principles of genealogical research and, as a matter of course, check secondary-source data (particularly that from a nineteenth-century genealogy such as ABC's) against primary sources; lamentably, none did. If anyone had bothered, he or she would have found the whole thing to be a "no-brainer." How many times does the lesson have to be repeated before it is learned? There are no shortcuts to reliable genealogical data! (Sorry for the sermon, but I just couldn't resist.) Gene Z.