WDYTYA The Reality A Letter to BBC

[coombs]

I can say this now passenger lists are NOT to be relied on. Many are faded and incoming ones from 1890 onwards are not reliable. Many list just surnames of the passengers and some may not have survived.

WDYTYA has lost its appeal a lot.

[millymcb]

It came right in the end when they gathered the facts of his later life - but it really made me laugh when they just came up with such a huge leap

milly

[coombs]

Johnson is a common name and I had to think at the time when they found a Joseph F Johnson on the 1885 passenger lists aged 56, a gardener travelling with a Fanny, that they had the right passenger list entry. Sorry but to me that is not quite enough evidence to prove it is him alone. For all they knew she could have been a daughter. There must have been a few Joseph Johnson's who were gardeners.

They must have had another piece of evidence to prove that was the right one on the list but they never mentioned it.

[DudleyWinchurch]

Missed the programme and just watched it today on IPlayer (using that for the first time).

I disagree with the "too great a leap" thing and think that they showed him doing exactly the right thing.

It began because someone on the other side of the Atlantic suggested that their Joseph F Johnson was his Joseph Forsyth Johnson.  The evidence seemed unlikely so he followed it up to see how much there was and how it fitted together.  He treated each peice with the right amount of scepticism.  He questioned each piece and phrased it carefully as possibilities and not certainties untill he had unravelled it all.  Finally, he had various examples of Jos./Joseph (F/orsyth) Johnson travelling to and fro at the right times, lots of other pieces of evidence from certificates and newspapers and calling cards to show that the person to be found under that name, whenever he could be found was not just a common "gardener" but a major landscape gardener who had carried out major projects that were well documented, sometimes with reference linking to the previous ones.  There was also evidence like the calling card that recorded many of the place names grouped together to show that it was all the same person and linked evidence of the two separate families.

On the basis of all this separate evidence, Bruce finally concluded that yes, it was not just a rumour, but clearly the same person and that these were indeed his relatives.  He then went on to follow up what happened to him and find his final resting place.

In my opinion, it was a great piece of research, using not just the obvious sources and jumping to what would be a dramatic but not necessarily accurate conclusion, but cross-checking with all sorts of other comtemporary evidence to find an interesting but uncomfortable story about someone not very distant from himself and his immediate relatives.

This is the real "meat on the bones" that makes family history so fascinating.

[millymcb]

My point about the "leap" was not about the rest of the programme... as I said - it all pieced together in the end ...BUT..
My problem was in the huge leap of logic from "Here is a wife called Fanny" to "here is her maiden name, year and place of birth, occupation and how she met him"...all in the space of 3 seconds with absolutely NO sign of any research whatsoever... PLUS the added error of using information they found later to tell Brucie the maiden name which he then used to verify the later information - which was where they presumably got the maiden name from in the first place. .

All the following information was very well researched and all pieced together very well to tell the story of the Joseph Johnson who went to New York on the boat with Fanny - and yes they did research it thoroughly and cross checked it all and had lots of evidence....

BUT ... (as coombs says) I too would have liked a little bit more proof that he was the original Joseph Forsythe Johnson who had left his wife and run away! Hopefully they did have more evidence but just did not tell us ... otherwise it could have been a very well researched piece of family history about someone completely random.

Normally I don't get bothered by omissions on this programme, I just presume they have done the research but could not fit it in - but in this particular instance I think they missed out telling us about something important. And at the end of the programme I think that they probably did have all the right people - but had not shown me enough proof of the pivotal event for me to be 100% sure. 

I may watch it again on iplayer (good isn't it?) - as I can't remember anything concrete which linked the Gardener in Georgia with the one from England directly...  as neither family knew about the other I can't imagine what they might have had.

Milly

[coombs]

Also in the past some of the celebs have been surprised at things that happened a lot in genealogy. Babs Windsor found she had a bit of Irish ancestors in her who settled in London then she found her paternal line originated in Suffolk and she was surprised as to why a Suffolk man would be in London. Babs, in the 1800s London was full of Norfolk and Suffolk people. Many Londoners claim Norfolk and Suffolk and Essex blood plus other areas of the UK.

My ancestor is on the 1900 US census. He says he arrived in America about 1887. I then found the passenger list in 1886 of someone with the right name and travelling with a daughter whose name and age matched that of my ancestors youngest daughter. The surname Musgrave is a lot less common than Johnson. I then found that a Margaret Musgrave married a Thomas Prosser in the right area of America in 1889 and the 1900 census says she was born in March 1871 in England and arrived in 1887. With that I think I can conclude that I have the right passenger list entry thanks to info given on the 1900 census and ages matching but with a commoner surname I'd want a bit more proof.

[Nick29]

I would think that doing American genealogy would be quite difficult, because for a long time there appeared to be no uniform way of doing things.   I have family that emigrated to the US (some were indeed early settlers), and the amount that I've been able to find has really been pot luck, dependent on where they came from, and where they settled.  I think in the UK we take a lot for granted when it comes to historical documents.