Brent, as one of my dearest friends once said when confronted with genealogical facts about her family, "There's a lot of bad genealogy going around." That being said, may I have your permission to repost this to my Northern Neck of Virginia rootsweb list? This type of story cannot be repeated often enough.

Yours Truly,
Craig Kilby

On Jan 8, 2013, at 3:56 PM, Tarter, Brent (LVA) wrote:

> Among the ink-and-paper hoaxes, late in the nineteenth century the editors of the six volumes of Appleton's Cyclopedia of American Biography paid contributors for their entries. One or more needy writers submitted biographies of people who were supposed to have done scientific research in South America, some with bibliographies of their publications. The editors had never heard of those scientists and evidently were pleased to be able to include records of their lives and achievements in the biographical reference work. It wasn't until much later when a scientist used some of those entries as a starting place for his own research that he discovered that the entries were all fakes, that no such scientists had ever existed, and that there was no record of the published scholarship cited in the entries in Appleton's.
> 
> See Margaret Castle Schindler, "Fictitious Biography," American Historical Review 42 (1937): 680-690.
> 
> Some of that stuff is probably floating around on the Internet, right now, and if it is obvious that it came from Appleton's, people will probably still believe it.
> 
> Brent Tarter
> The Library of Virginia
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