Our story, so far:
We began climbing our ladder to Providence with my great-grandfather, Alfred Tuttle. Our goal was to examine the available evidence connecting each generation of his ancestry back to the founding of Providence Plantations, Rhode Island.
Rung 1: Alfred Tuttle to his mother, Florence (Hart) Tuttle. Confirmed with records.
Rung 2: Florence Hart to her mother, Hattie (Wells) Hart. Confirmed with records.
Rung 3: Hattie Wells to her father, Harlow C Wells. Confirmed with records.
Rung 4: Harlow C Wells to his mother, Cyrena (Whitford) Wells. Tenuous connection; documents don't directly confirm the relationship, but clues do support it.
Rung 5: Cyrena Whitford to her father, Greene Whitford. Weak support from available evidence; no direct confirmation, but plausible.
Rung 6: Greene Whitford - his mother, Alice Matteson:
Greene Whitford (1759-c. 1816) was the son of Thomas Whitford (1734–1818) and Alice Matteson (1734–1818). We know this because Thomas's will, proved in 1818, named Greene among his heirs, and because Alice's maiden name was handwritten on the document.1
While we are missing documentary evidence of key facts about Greene's life (birth, death, AND his first marriage) we have evidence placing him in Vermont and New York that generally supports the account recorded by his cousin, William Whitford.
Thomas's will is a fairly solid piece of primary, documentary evidence that Greene was his son - and because it lists several other siblings, we have a lot of points of comparison to look for. Finding marriage records to confirm that Greene's sisters married men with the surnames indicated in Thomas's adds support to the reliability of that document for our genealogical purposes. We also have, of course, the marriage record of Thomas Whitford and Alice Matteson on 9 Jan 1752 in West Greenwich, Kent County, Rhode Island.
This is still not an overwhelming amount of evidence, but what we do have feels nice and solid after two generations of tenuous evidence, speculation, and theorizing!
However, now we have a different problem to contend with - that of (perhaps) too many sources telling slightly different stories. Our ladder moves up to Alice Matteson, and there are several published works that record the genealogy of Matteson, Whitford, and Greene families in Rhode Island, but not all of them have stood up to historical scrutiny.
We'll take a look at the view from Rung 7 next week!
Ancestry.com; ''Rhode Island, U.S., Wills and Probate Records, 1582-1932'', extract from East Greenwich, R.I. Wills, Book 5, page 502; [membership may be required to view]; Lehi, UT, Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2015.