old letters

It was during the Depression I think that Frank Leverett, famous geologist, got interested in family genealogy, and actually went to Boston to see what he could dig up. My great grandfather Will was in his generation, and also interested, and saved many of the letters from Frank, among which this is one. You can see that it comes from Ann Arbor, and its date is 1940. It's a classic.

In it he claims that Will's father James W. had made a mistake. James W. had come through Boston when he was four; had received some children's things from one of his aunts who was taken with how cute a child he was, and had named that aunt as one of the two that were living there with his grandmother, who he met only that once. They had a stagecoach at the time (1834), had it all decked out, and were on their way from Maine to Illinois.

So this aunt, Frank said, was a relict, or surviving widow, of a Leverett, brother of James W.'s father. But the one who had lost two children was different from the one James W. had named. Frank figured this out.

But my question is this: Is it possible that James W. was right, even though he was only four, and the two lost children should have been attributed to the aunt he named, not the other aunt? These trees are sometimes reconstructed on very flimsy evidence, and are often reconstructed wrong. A child who died, well who knows who its actual parents were? I guess it's just a question. We are using one tree to call James W. wrong, while maybe we should be using James W.'s personal witness to question that tree.

Not sure if anything will come of this. I'll show you the letter if you're interested.