Church member record for LDS Church seems to have created a fictional person.
My ancestry line includes a family which states in all the histories that that there are 13 children. However, there is now an additional child that has been added on FamilySearch based on a legitimate-looking church record. GKWJ-QJR. Clarina Snedaker. There are NO other records that seem to be related to her that I can find. And more importantly, the family stories, census records, etc, all support that there are indeed only 13 children. How do I resolve this?
Answers
-
First of all, I would be open to the possibility that such a daughter actually existed. The membership record indicates that she has the same birth date 15 Sep 1872 and blessing date 5 Dec 1872 as her brother David Snedaker. If that record and the 1880 US Census record (where no daughter named Clarina appears) are both reliable, then that means that she was born as a fraternal twin to David, lived at least until 5 Dec 1872, and then died sometime before the 1880 Census. If she died quite young, then it's possible that there was no newspaper article about her death, and there was possibly no death certificate (at least none has been located yet).
There are some odd custom events attached to Clarina's profile. Neither of these two events has any source to back them up.
- An 1875 blessing seems odd, since that was typically only done once, and there is a clear record of that 5 Dec 1872 blessing. The second blessing certainly seems like it should be deleted, since it came along with the incorrect attachment of Claymore's LDS Membership record.
- The 9 Sep 1887 baptism event seems odd as well, since her omission on the 1880 Census would make it likely that she died before 1880. The baptism record is hard to explain, and seems problematic. You might try to contact the person who created the person profile and added all this to see if they can provide any more details.
It seems hasty to conclude that this person is fictional, since that can only be true if you can explain away the presence of the Membership record that clearly ties her to her parents, and the date of the birth and blessing match David, who also has an attached Membership record that documents his birth and blessing.
4 -
There's a family tree on Ancestry that shows Clarina and David as twins plus 5 of these children died in childhood in1885 and a half-brother who died in 1878 — the membership record on Ancestry was imported from FS and its possible any paper records would have been in cursive and very hard to read. Also on the blessing date, Thursday Dec 5 1872 there was an unusually heavy amount of snow, suggesting to me that the blessing was probably done at home since the twins were only 3 months old
0