Hi Norris, I, too, like solid sources but I trust information 50 years after the date more than assumptions 300+ years after the date. Good research is an excellant idea but I am a little leary also of the "babies being thrown out with the bath water" today because there isn't tangible physical evidence. My grandmother had no birth record and that was in 1897! Luckily there were school records so she could prove she was born to the Social Security people. They just didn't bother to record her birth. I am not sure those school records will be around in three hundred years so the only sources will be secondary, no primary ones, and they will be stuck with only my say so in the family book. I am sure this happened far more often in the sixteen hundreds! My other grandmother was not recorded until almost nine months after her birth because they were not sure she would live. That was in 1890! There is a whole family of children of Nathaniel Richmond who, because the Mayflower Society cannot find a birth record attributing them to Nathaniel were orphaned by them and only membership through his wife is allowed. There is record of them being his children in Joshua Bailey Richmond's "The Richmond Family" but they disallow that because there are mistakes elsewhere in the book. This is dangerous because we are losing our only sources on some lines and they are valid ones. The further we get from the fact the less we will have and in some cases we are in danger of changing history rather than clarifying it. Do not expect primary sources for everything in a world that had little paper and few who could read and write. They just do not exist. We still calculate age from date of death in many instances, even today. As for Jacobus (outstanding work!) and others, they were limited by time and space far more than we are now with our computers. I can sit here in Maine and check original sources all over the country. In their time it was grueling work to go to the towns themselves and dig the facts out. It is the way I started doing genealogy over 35 years ago and it takes untold hours of searching and sifting and recording. I am serious about some research needing to be done in the Lynn, Salem area. The land was sold as Salem land and I don't know how much searching has been done in that area. Time for one of those grueling trips, I guess (Yipee! yay! alright!). I love the Phillips Memorial Library in Salem! Gail This appears to be something > written sometime after she had died (1683), maybe from a county > history book? Who wrote it? How would they know about an event of 50 > years earlier (if it was written as early as 1683?) Why didn't Jacobus > and the army of other Spencer researchers since the 1850's ever find > it?