DNA being put to good use

[At home in NZ]

An article from the New Zealand Herald about an adoptee finding her birth father and what he was.

 

[peter]

Great story - but not necessarily completely accurate, since there was no Stanley Thomas Taylor born in Liverpool at the right time. He might possibly be:

TAYLOR, STANLEY THOMAS
GRO Reference: 1930 M Quarter in MANCHESTER NORTH Volume 08D Page 888

 

[At home in NZ]

Great story - but not necessarily completely accurate, since there was no Stanley Thomas Taylor born in Liverpool at the right time. He might possibly be:

TAYLOR, STANLEY THOMAS
GRO Reference: 1930 M Quarter in MANCHESTER NORTH Volume 08D Page 888

Not all people born in Liverpool are registered in the Liverpool registration district. I was born in a suburb of Liverpool but you won’t find me registered as Liverpool.

I have found the deportation voyage for Stanley T Taylor birth date 17.2.30 his address in the UK was West Didsbury, I don’t need to look that up, it’s a suburb of Manchester.

I believe this is his death record and this his burial both lead back to the birth registration you have quoted.

 

[peter]

Not all people born in Liverpool are registered in the Liverpool registration district. I was born in a suburb of Liverpool but you won’t find me registered as Liverpool.

I don't think any experienced researcher is going to assume that someone born in Liverpool will necessarily have been registered in Liverpool RD - that's the sort of error that only beginners make. In 1930 more Liverpudlian births were registered in West Derby RD than in Liverpool RD.

I have found the deportation voyage for Stanley T Taylor birth date 17.2.30 his address in the UK was West Didsbury, I don’t need to look that up, it’s a suburb of Manchester.

Yes, I also found that passenger list entry - definitely no need to look up where Didsbury is because it's shown in the passenger list as Manchester 20.

But given the newspaper has the wrong birthplace and the wrong age, and describes the name as 'very common', which it isn't, can we be sure of anything in the article?

 

[At home in NZ]

I don't think any experienced researcher is going to assume that someone born in Liverpool will necessarily have been registered in Liverpool RD - that's the sort of error that only beginners make. In 1930 more Liverpudlian births were registered in West Derby RD than in Liverpool RD.

Yes, I also found that passenger list entry - definitely no need to look up where Didsbury is because it's shown in the passenger list as Manchester 20.

But given the newspaper has the wrong birthplace and the wrong age, and describes the name as 'very common', which it isn't. can we be sure of anything in the article?

I know it's dangerous to do so but I am assuming the wrong birthplace has come from a 1939 register entry because the address is 1.1miles from the 'home of John Lennon' which is mentioned in the article.
I could spend all day researching this guy but I don't want to give that amount of time to somebody I have no link to.
The information in the article appears to have come from what the librarian found out, who was possibly not an Ancestry user at the time, plus what other researchers have cobbled together in Ancestry trees.
I have thought all along that if trees are wrong then the DNA is also wrong. I do not want to get into further discussion about the merits of DNA or otherwise. However I still think it was put to good use in helping the librarian to find her father.

 

[peter]

I have thought all along that if trees are wrong then the DNA is also wrong.

The DNA can't be wrong, but someone might draw the wrong conclusions if they're relying on faulty evidence. The danger is that someone who is not an experienced family historian will select records based on their availability rather than on their relevance - that's why so many dubious trees show connections to the aristocracy (they are more likely to have left evidence for us to find).

What we don't know from the newspaper article is how much of the information originated from, or was confirmed by, the cousins that the adoptee found from her father's side. The key point is that there are sufficient obvious errors in the article that we cannot take anything at face value.