Betsy, I see that you are still puzzled. > I'm very aware that families intermarry, I run a RootsWeb mailing list for > cousin marriages and have several cousin marriages in my ancestry. The > reason why I don't think this is the case is that I've got families that > cover a wide area, different social structures and so far I've found no > evidence that any of them are related. > > My ancestors on my Mother's side that I found in Dick's files were moneyed > people in Yorkshire, England (WILKINSON) that later aligned with English > Royalty > > My ancestors on my Father's side that I found in Dick's files (MOORE) were > not moneyed people and lived in the southern areas of England in the > Devonshire area (I understand there may be/could be some common ancestor > between these two families way back... [added note: this family's research > goes back to 1567 with no trace of MOORE that I can find in it] - if so, I'd > like to find it) > > The ancestors on my Husband's side that I found in Dick's files (SAUVE dit > LaPLANTE, SAUVE, LaPLANTE) were French Canadians and immigrated from France. > There should be NO common link between this family and the two listed above. > > See why I'm perplexed? You seem to be assuming that the link between the various families is a direct one in earlier years. It almost certainly isn't, given the differences in origins. But that doens't mean they might not be genuinely linked in Dick's data. Here is one possible explanation. Assume that one of the thousands of descendants of your WILKINSON family of England, a Marie WILKINSON lived in California in 1930s. And that person married a Joshua HALE (a name you don't have in your ancestry at all). And assume that this Joshua HALE was the descendant of a Morris HALE who lived in New Jersey in 1720. And assume that Morris HALE's wife was Abigail WAINWRIGHT (another name you don't have in your ancestry). Further assume that Abigail's sister was Mary WAINWRIGHT who married a Joseph WALES (another name you don't have). And further assume that Mary and Joseph had a direct descendant Arthur FITCH who lived in Ohio in 1930 and married a Felice LaPLANTE, who happended to descend from your French-Canadian LaPLANTE family. In this way both WILKINSON and LaPLANTE could be in a genealogy database and there would be a link between them (the one I just described). But it would NOT be a direct ancestral link, nor would it be a simple link by a single marriage. Rather, to describe the link one would have to run up and down a number of family's ancestries, jumping from tree to tree at marriage points. I know that Dick built his file by combining material from many different genealogies. He imported into his database many of the post 1880 DUTTON family descendants living n Chester County that I had researched and gave to him in a computer file. He could easily have combined data from different people researching (in this hypothetical) WAINWRIGHT and WALES and - voila - the link between your WILKINSON and LaPLANTE families would have emerged. Yet, with 250,000 records in his file and these being ancillary to his DUTTON research he probably would not have known the link actually existed. So even if he were alive today, hw would be as surprised as you are to find it. In point of fact, the link could be even more exotic than what I have described. The one I described only requires 3 marriages (WILKINSON-HALE in the 1930s in California, HALE-WAINWRIGHT in the 1720s in New Jersey, and FITCH-LaPLANTE inthe 1930s in Ohio). It may well require 8 or 11 marriages. Hope this helps. Doug Hall