Maternity of Elizabeth Dale revisited

The Maternity of Eliazabeth Dale, Pt. 2

I am constructing this thread because this discussion has spilled over
into many threads; people are telling me they have posted material
I'm having difficulty locating, etc.

This is what I'd like to do:

a. Confine the discussion to the VA/MD region. Please, no Maine census
returns, late medieval wills, 3 PCC wills, etc. Why? Because I'm
not disputing that the term "sonne in law" could have multiple
meanings, and I don't want to needlessly complicate matters by
introducing foreign material. I appreciate these posters' efforts to
put some evidence on the table, and I find it interesting, but my
ancestors lived in Lancaster Co., VA, so I'd like to confine the
evidence we peruse at least to the VA/MD area. As far as I know,
nobody has presented any 17th century VA documents, but if they have,
could they re-post them here?
b. Confine the evidence to the 17th century, or at least before large
numbers of Scots-Irish settled in VA. I'm not knocking the
Scots-Irish, I'm just trying to keep things as culturally simple as I
can. I know it's not perfect, but there you go.
c. Discuss the term "son in law." I know "daughter in law" is
a corresponding term for females, but I don't want to introduce
another variable, and since it may have had some different twists than
its male counterpart, I don't want that to become a side issue. I
will stipulate that it means much the same thing as "sonne in law"
for women, and leave it at that.
d. For reasons of clarity, I would like anybody posting to this thread
to state their position in two paragraphs or less, unless you have a
deed or will to put into evidence, in which case an abstract and
summary of the finding and why the finding was made would be useful.
It is hard to judge anecdotal evidence such as "all genealogists
know", etc. That may be true, but I'm a genealogist and I might
not know, so it will eliminate derailing the discussion into a
pointless direction. I know that's an arbitrary stipulation, and in
the view of some restrictive, but it will force people to choose their
words carefully, and prevent anybody, myself included, from hijacking
the thread.

My position, simply stated, is that the various uses of the term
"sonne in law" are not equal in frequency. In the ordinary course
of things, some occur more frequently than others. The use of the term
as to mean "husband of my biological daughter" is the most common
meaning, then and now. Because it has not been demonstrated that the

Doug McDonald...

That is correct, but your weighting has to be tempered by
one fact.

Say you find "son-in-law" to mean husband of biological
daughter 95% of the time, and husband of step-daughter 5% of
the time. But if you discover that only 5% of daughters are
step-daughters, then in fact people referred to husbands of
daughters equally as "son-in-law" independant of whether
they were biological or step daughters. If you discover that
30% of daughters were step daughters, then you have evidence
that people were less likely to refer to husbands of step
daughters as "son-in-law" compared to referring to husbands
of biological daughters.

mjcar...

None of which will assist in coming to an "ironclad" conclusion in any
one specific case.

Doug McDonald

usage "husband of my step-daughter" occurs with enough frequency to
pose a problem in the interpretation of the evidence, I am not going to
reject a genealogical conclusion simply based upon its use in a
document, unless there are contra-indications. In other words, I am
going to "weigh" the value of this evidence according to the
frequency with which it meant certain things and whether or not there
are other problems with the pedigree.
Given that many VA families had daughters that married, the term
"sonne in law" must have been used in many documents. We therefore
should be careful that our arguments really mean something, since they
impact a great many research situations. To require that a researcher
ferret out every possible meaning to satisfy somebody else's opinion
might not be justified.

That's it. I have to sign off until sometime tomorrow, but I am
hoping that enough people will contribute to this thread to give a wide
spectrum of opinion.