I too do not wish to be contentious, but I think there's a very important
point lurking here.  Legal marriage and actual kinship were/are two
different things, as we all know.  Genealogy concerns itself largely with
the legal, documented relationships.  The problem arises when we allow
ourselves to think that the documents define reality.  I would suggest that
if a person suddenly had a life-and-death need to locate blood relatives,
that person would be extremely interested in identifying and finding the
"side family" his grandfather had.  So then, in that case, what is the
genealogical "reality"--the documented family or the undocumented family?

Historians and biographers are interested in kinships that may have been
extra-legal or illegal, because these kinships illuminate our understanding
of the past.  It is fascinating to find evidence of 18th-century people
being aware of their extra-legal kin and acting on that knowledge.  Thus,
did so-and-so bequeath land to so-and-so because they were secretly father
and son, or uncle and nephew, or cousins, or nothing at all to each other?
 Some folks--and I do not mean to include Ms. Holland here--have tried to
shut down research along such lines by saying "there's no documentation for
that; you have no basis for saying that."  In some cases, the people of the
18th century had a more flexible definition of "family" than the definitions
established by law.  The laws enable us to deny the existence of family
connections which the people of the past may have honored and acted upon; so
by adhering strictly to the rules we risk misunderstanding the past.

HW

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