More than what they seem

With some of the older family genealogies, the compilers likely relied on oral and written statements and less on documents and vital records, thus a Pilgrim ancestor may have been overlooked. This turned out to be the case with Jael Edson and her children, Adeline and Nathan Babbitt. The Babbitt genealogy that contained their photos named only George Soule and John Alden as ancestors. After some research into just how Jael was related to those families, I discovered two other references in Silver Books to John Howland and Edward Doty. Since Jael was born in 1787, the family member(s) interviewed around 1910-12 probably knew only hearsay. Word had somehow not trickled down, as the family migrated west, of two other Plymouth ancestors. It pays to check the Silver/Pink books every time, and to read back up the entire line for references to marriages of someone in that line to another Mayflower passenger's descendant.