Although unrelated to family history, something I read recently started me thinking about automatic assumptions used when drawing up family trees. It made me look at the Tripp part of my family tree in a different way. For years, my Tripp family line was pretty solid back to Charles Tripp born in 1761 in Duchess County, New York, thanks to help from others who were interested in the Tripp family line. When autosomal DNA testing came along, I even had genetic proof.
Genetic proof multiplied as more and more Tripps submitted their DNA for testing. But I was hoping for UK matches and the Tripps I was connected to were in the US, hardly surprising given Ancestry.coms US bias. I ignored my Tripp matches.
That changed in April. An invitation to enter my line of Tripps in the Guest Book sounded easy. I had all the names on a family tree back to Charles Tripp (born 1761). So, it should have been easy to enter the info and get back to planning my pending research trip. No such luck. A return email brought a write up of an extension to my family line to be considered. The researchers had come up with a potential father for Charles which would link him back to a pedigree reaching back to the original American settler.
The report on Charles' father and the link to the founding family used extensive documentary evidence. Best of all, I believed that it met the Genealogical Proof Standard that I had been hearing so much about. At one fell swoop, I now had a line that took me back to the original Tripp settler, the founder John Tripp who ended up in Rhode Island in the early 1600s. My Tripp entry is now in the Guest Book https://www.trippgenealogy.org/wordpress/guest-book/ under John Tripp's third son Joseph. But therein lies my conundrum.
When the rest of the couples were added into my line back to John the founder, there was one of those pedigree collapse items in there that confuse family tree software programs. A Tripp had married a Tripp and they were both offspring of John the founder. Convention (and Y-DNA studies) list couples linking the male surnames if possible. But I started to question this convention while reading Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men. Was our way of recording a case of data bias? What about the female line back to John the founder? In my line, *Lydia Tripp, the granddaughter of the founder John Tripp, married Jonathan Tripp, John Tripp's great grandson, which meant that Lydia was a closer link to the original settler. She was the daughter of John Tripp's son James, so perhaps my line should be listed under John's fifth son, James.
Where did this alternate view of my Tripp family tree leave me? It had taken me a long time to figure out how I was related to one of my fellow researchers. I finally settled on fifth cousin once removed based on our line back through the third son Joseph. But the other researcher had the same pedigree collapse in his line as well (we won't even think about the fact that Jonathan and Lydia Tripp's mothers were sisters). I don't think fifth cousin once removed cuts it anymore.
Sources:
Andrews, Janet Tripp and Jan E. Tripp "Research on the Lineage of Charles Tripp (1784 - 1828), October 17, 2016
*Bock, Margaret Buckridge. "Descendants of John Tripp of Portsmouth, R.I." The Geneaologist 4, no. 1 (1983): 59-128
http://trippgenealogy.org/TrippFamily/sources/Volume-4-No-1-Spring1983-ed-2.pdf
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