Did genealogists create a man who never lived?
Well regarded genealogists dating back to the work of G. Andrews Moriarty and John Osborne Austin have reported that one of the sons of Daniel2 Wilcox was Daniel3 Wilcox. Moriarty and Austin also list a second Daniel3 Wilcox as the son of Stephen2 Wilcox.[i],[ii] Stephen2 and Daniel2 were brothers and the only known surviving sons of Edward1 Wilcox, the immigrant ancestor of this branch of the Wilcox family.
Jane Fletcher Fiske, author of Thomas Cooke of Rhode Island: a genealogy of Thomas Cooke, alias Butcher of Netherbury, Dorsetshire, England, … , (pp. 67-69), suggested that Daniel3 Wilcox, son of Stephen2 Wilcox, had perhaps been misidentified. Records for Daniel3 Wilcox, son of Daniel2 Wilcox, ended by 1690 in communities that were on the east side of Narragansett Bay. He was the stepson of Elizabeth3 Cooke (John2, Francis1), the second wife of Daniel2 Wilcox. At about the same time that Daniel disappeared from the east side of Narragansett Bay, his wife Hannah had evidently taken up with another man (Enoch Briggs) and they began having children together prior to their marriage several years later.[iii]
In about 1693, a Daniel3 Wilcox, purported son of Stephen2 Wilcox, began creating records at locations on the west side of Narragansett Bay. As Fiske pointed out, it is very possible that the purported son of Stephen2 was “created” by researchers who did not recognize that this Daniel3 Wilcox living on the west side of Narragansett Bay was possibly the same man who left his wife and relocated from the east side of Narragansett Bay.
Fiske’s theory of possible misidentification is plausible, but to our knowledge no additional research on her theory has been published. However, Jane Fletcher Fiske’s ideas appear to be supported by the results of Big Y-700 DNA testing at the Wilcox project site on FamilyTreeDNA (FTDNA). The project includes forty-two individual Y-DNA test results for the Edward1 Wilcox branch of the Wilcox family, including twenty Big Y-700 tests. Edward1 had two sons, Daniel2 and Stephen2. A recent analysis of the Big Y-700 block tree results for living men who have traditionally been considered descendants of Daniel3, son of Stephen2, suggests that Stephen2 may not have been the biological father of this Daniel3.
Our theory is that Fiske’s ideas are likely accurate, and that Stephen2 did not have a son named Daniel — the only Daniel3 Wilcox was a son of Daniel2 and he was the man who left his wife Hannah and relocated to the west side of Narragansett Bay for the remainder of his life.
Additional Y-DNA testing is needed to solidify the evidence supporting this hypothesis. More information can be found at the link to the Wilcox yDNA Project. Funds are currently available to pay for testing costs for men who descend from several different sons of Daniel2 Wilcox and Stephen2 Wilcox.
[i] G. Andrews Moriarty, “One Branch of the Rhode Island Wilcox Family,” The American Genealogist, 19 (1942): 23-31. Online at AmericanAncestors.org.
[ii] John Osborne Austin, The genealogical dictionary of Rhode Island : comprising three generations of settlers who came before 1690, with additions and correction by John Osborne Austin and G. Andrews Moriarty (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., Inc., 1978), 422-424. [Austin’s original edition was published in 1887.]
[iii] More details on Enoch Briggs and his relationship with Hannah (Cook) Wilcox can be found in volume 3 of Descendants of Edward1 Wilcox by Alan Wilcox.