Would you be so kind as to give us the Northern Neck of Virginia Rootsweb
list, Please.
Jpadams
Texas
-----Original Message-----
From: Discussion of research and writing about Virginia history
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Craig Kilby
Sent: Tuesday, January 08, 2013 3:10 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Not-Wikipedia Hoaxes
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
> [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
> Please visit the Library of Virginia's Web site at
> http://www.lva.virginia.gov<http://www.lva.virginia.gov/>
>
>
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