Giving Credit Where Credit is Due

 I don't plan these posts.  Something occurs to me or my attention is called to some bit of information and I write something.  Such is the case now.

It's New Year's Eve, 2022.  I've planned nothing other than to stay home and off the roads.  Yesterday, for no apparent reason, I felt very tired.  Today, I'm interested in Hannah Chase Butler who is an ancestor of my paternal Grandmother.  She's buried in the Tyler Cemetery near Roxbury, New York.

The Tyler Cemetery is also the resting place of a number of the Stratton Family members.

Hannah Chase married Barnabas "Barney" Butler sometime between 1830 and 1834.  One of their daughters was named Mary Gould.  In Roxbury, is the Jay Gould Reformed Church which I believe my grandmother attended as a child.  I don't know if the name was simply borrowed or if there was a family connection.

In any case, I'm looking, as I'm writing, at a web site called the Roxbury Experience; at a page giving the History of Stratton Falls.  The site appears to be owned and designed by a couple of hotel owners.  In any case, the glaring "error", as I see it, in their history of Stratton Falls, is in not giving credit where credit is due.  It is a very, very common error in historical and genealogical writing: 

"Joseph Stratton, who died in 1827, had eight children (two daughters and six sons); his brother Samuel (d. 1838) had three daughters and two sons, Jesse and Jonathan."

I know it's splitting hairs but -- never did a man have eight children; or even one.

Because traditionally and conventionally, family history and genealogy has followed the line of the father; and, because, historically, women had NO status, everything was credited to the fathers.  It's time that changed.  Particularly since so many women were left with the sole support of their children; the fathers serving, more or less, simply as sires; sperm donors.  I'm sorry to be so blunt.  In fact, some middle names came from the mothers' families.  In addition, young women often married cousins from either side of the families.

Finally, it is more often the women who are preserving the family histories.

So, I will give credit where credit is due.  It is women who have children; who give birth.  Father's may give surnames, but women give birth.  As the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) federation say, "Women are the givers of life, men are the protectors."

Have a Wonderful New Year.