This is a Message Board Post that is gatewayed to this mailing list. Surnames: Sweet Classification: Birth Message Board URL: http://boards.ancestry.com/mbexec/msg/rw/HBRBAIB/1358 Message Board Post: Seeking verification by secondary source, e.g Bible entry, burial record, gravestone, etc. re 1758 year of birth in Rhode Island on April 11 that year of twins Gideon and James, sons of Job Sweet and Sarah Kingsley Sweet Note: Year of birth is missing from primary record, the extant N. and S. Kingston, RI birth records, which were partially destroyed by fire in the late 1800s.

Joe wrote: > Seeking verification by secondary source, e.g Bible entry, burial > record, gravestone, etc. re 1758 year of birth in Rhode Island on > April 11 that year of twins Gideon and James, sons of Job Sweet and > Sarah Kingsley Sweet Note: Year of birth is missing from primary > record, the extant N. and S. Kingston, RI birth records, which were > partially destroyed by fire in the late 1800s. The story on James is a bit complicated. Arnold's transcription of the half-burned vital records does indeed show the same birthday for him and Gideon, without showing the year for either, but there are other sources. First, there is a veteran's pension file for James (S21517), which states his birth as 1760 Apr 11 in North Kingsto[w]n, RI. It also says James resided in Shaftsbury, VT, and died (there??) in 1847. His son-in-law Joseph Ellsworth was living in Shaftsbury in 1852. If that's when the application was filed, the birth information is necessarily secondary. In any case, the names of James' children (such as Joseph Ellsworth's wife) are not given. Note: this pension file is one of many that Cyndi Sweet abstracted and posted to the list in 1999. The other source is a family Bible that came through a great grandson of James' younger brother Jonathan (-> William -> Mary Ann -> Grover). The Bible was probably a wedding gift to Mary Ann and, as such, contained a copy of the information in what may have been the original family Bible of that line of Sweets. A transcript of the Underwood Bible shows the birth of Gideon as 1758 Apr 11 and James as 1760 Oct 17. Note the completely different dates. I believe the vital records (or at least Arnold's transcription) were in error because of copying the date Apr 11 twice by mistake from information supplied all at once by the family. John Chandler