Rootsweb Hosted John Clark 1740-1818 Website

URL for the John Clark website: 

https://freepages.rootsweb.com/~clark49heritage/genealogy/JohnClark_Index.html

Updating Website, Ancestry tree, etc

I am updating my electronic records on the Rootsweb hosted John Clark 1740 website, my Ancestry Cornish Family tree, this blog, and purging my papers. I have many things to post, so I will post here and on Ancestry to my Cornish Family Tree under the subject of the post.

My Bedford and Pound Ridge surnames are Clark, Weed, Westcott, Scofield and many more. My goal is to eliminate my piles of loose genealogy papers and notes, and clean up my records on Ancestry.

Because the Ancestry tree was built in spurts, over time, and using Ancestry's "hints" and borrowing from other trees, some information may be inaccurate. For the past two years I have scrutinized information more carefully. I have added a lot of information, but where you find few sources, the information may have research pending.

Ancestry has recently added tags ("unverified," "actively researching," etc.) to make it obvious to the page viewer that verification may be pending.

I have spent months reviewing sources as near to original as possible. I have learned to review published accounts with skepticism where those accounts contain lineages of hundreds of people when it is obvious the author/authors could not have researched those many people. I have found that some authors make numerous assumptions about relationships within a particular surname. Most of the grossly negligent genealogies were published in the late 19th century.

There are very early historical accounts that are sure to yield pieces of the Clark puzzle. The review of which demands patience, time, and the ability to trace the various lines. I only have electronic copies available to me. There may be many early resources I do not, and will not, have available to me.

My goal is to assemble a well-sourced and most probable scenario of our earliest New England forefathers for the time period 1620-1740; the four generations in question. Two of those generations, perhaps William, Sr. and William, Jr. of Bedford and Stamford, should be focused on first. Collecting as much fact as possible should make the picture of those two generations more clear.

From there, it would be wise to study the family groups and allied families to formulate a scientifically sound hypothesis about the earliest two or three generations to determine when and where they immigrated to New England.

I find myself without a collaborative research partner, so this mission will not be a speedy one. Also interfering with my progress, is sorting through old notes and papers on the dozens of family lines I have chased over the years. Future research is focused on the Bedford Clark line only.

John Clark 1740 Website is Back

Hurray!

This week I discovered my Rootsweb site is back online. It may have been back for some time, but I had not checked in almost a year. I had given up on Rootsweb some time ago, so I was delighted to see it back.

I also was FINALLY able to recover access to this blog, which I had also given up on and started a NEW blog this week. So there are two John Clark blogs. I will transfer the post from the new one and delete it since I have this one back.

John Clark Website still not back online

It has been a month, and the website is still not back. This process was supposed to take two weeks. I am very disappointed with rootsweb. When I have more time I will check into the problem again.

John Clark 1740 Website

Rootsweb hosting should have my site back within the next couple weeks. In the meantime, I have been looking at John Clark, b. 1612 who arrived in 1634 and went to Wethersfield; leaving in 1639 for New Haven Colony of which Stamford grew. John could have been grandfather to William Clark, proprietor in Bedford, 1680. Since Samuel Clark has supposedly been knocked off the throne as our progenitor, I want to look into John Clark. I also want to revisit the records to see WHY Samuel Clark is NOT our progenitor.

Rootsweb Site

Still no sign of having my website back online with rootsweb. I hope all that work is not lost. Meanwhile, I will work on the tree on Ancestry. I find things added to my tree on Ancestry that I never put there, so I find this platform less than ideal. With the old website on rootsweb, I would hear from other family researchers which was terrific. This blog has not yielded the same results. I am holding out hope rootsweb will restore their user sites in the future.

Rootsweb is still not back online. A recent update says they are still working on the issue. In the meantime, access to my John Clark website is not available. Likewise, GenWeb sites hosted on Rootsweb are also inaccessible. We can only wait. I had become convinced a few years ago, that it would be wise to convert all my genealogy papers to electronic data. I had done so with many records. Now, I regret that decision. This mess with Rootsweb has been a major obstacle. In the not-too-distant future, I will retrieve what electronic records I have, and publish them to be distributed in relevant repositories. This is a long-term project with no foreseeable release date.