My 3x and also 4x great grandfather, James Maitland1, appears in 81 family trees on the Ancestry website, and almost all list his father as Johnathan Maitland. Not one of them has provided a source for this, and there is a very good reason for that because Johnathan Maitland was a figment of my imagination, or perhaps more generously a somewhat fanciful hypothesis that I came up with in the very early days of my research.
Around 20 years ago, before documents were readily available online, I spent a week in the county records office in Dorchester trawling through their microfiche collection and discovered the baptism of a Thomas Peter Maitland on 28 June 1772 in Durweston, which is two miles north of Blandford Forum. Maitland is a rare name in 18th century Dorset and, as my ancestor was born around 1769 and lived in Blandford, I naturally wondered if there could be a link.
Thomas Peter’s parents are now transcribed in online databases as “John and his wife”, but there is a smudge in the original register, which led me to speculate that his father’s name could actually have been longer than four letters. In a classic case of confirmation bias, I noted that James Maitland had a son named Johnathan and surmised that he might have been named after a grandfather.
Exploring this kind of unverified hunch is a perfectly normal part of genealogical research, and none of this would have been a problem if I had not logged the idea on the Genes Reunited website and then failed to notice that other people had not only begun to copy my theory into their own trees, but had also removed my question marks in the process.
Despite the complete lack of evidence that Johnathan Maitland ever existed or that John and his wife were even James Maitland’s parents, once enough people had done this it became an accepted fact that has since spread across genealogical websites like a virus. Johnathan has even acquired a birthdate of 1749 as someone has clearly followed the genealogical convention of subtracting 20 years from the birth of a child to provide an estimated date for their parent. It is also now common for James Maitland’s birthplace to be entered as “Dorset”, though again there is absolutely nothing to support this.
Ancestry trees are sadly riddled with this type of error, which as in this case are generally the result of simply copying from an existing tree without verifying sources. It is a constant frustration when using the site and I feel very guilty that my big mistake has contributed to the problem.
So, if anyone with an interest in James Maitland is reading this, please forgive his penitent descendant for her part in creating his fictional parent and, if you have included Johnathan Maitland in your tree: please, please delete him !
1 I am descended from two of his sons, see Surprise
Sleuthing Notes 