Wavetops: William Bowen, Jr. (1783-1854)
A connection to the world tree
When you put your work into WikiTree, the goal is to make your contributions as solid as possible. You want your ancestors’ profiles to be as thoroughly documented with evidence as possible, with source citations pointing other researchers to your sources.
At some point, an ancestor you’ve put a lot of time and attention into will connect to an existing profile that ties your work into what the folks at WikiTree describe as the “World Tree” - and if everyone has brought their best work to their profiles, you should be able to rely on that connection.
But often, your ancestor was not the focus of the other person’s full attention, and you get a connection to a profile that needs work.
The point here is not to criticize the Profile manager or anyone else who updated the profile - I assume they did the best they could with the information they had on hand. (I include myself in that assessment.) I only point out that when I make that connection to the World Tree, my work is not done.
I still need to examine each profile and look for evidence to support the facts before I can say with any certainty that what is there on the page is correct. So, if you follow the link to William Bowen's Wikitree profile, and click that green “Ancestors” button, you can see that William is far from the “top” of my tree. Yet, because the evidence I have to support his connection to these other ancestors is so insubstantial, I consider him to be the “Wavetop” of this branch.
William Bowen, Jr. was probably the grandfather of my great-great-grandmother, Amanda Lydia (Walker) Callin. Amanda was one of My Sixteen, of course, and you can read more about her family here:
Despite digging into this branch of the family many times over the years, I still have precious little information about who Amanda’s mother, Lydia Bowen was. Sometimes she is referred to as “Lydia Anti Bowen” in other peoples’ trees and notes, but I don’t know if that’s a middle name, a misspelling of “Ann” or some other artifact of having information handed down through multiple generations.
What I do have is an 1850 U.S. Census Record from before Lydia’s marriage to William “Yankee” Walker that lists Lydia in a Huron County household with her father, stepmother, and a couple of siblings. That seems sufficient to tie her to her father - and there is existing research on him that seems convincing. You can follow the link on his WikiTree page to his Find-A-Grave profile where someone has copied information about William from the New England Historical and Genealogical Register (which is databases here: NEHGR, Jan. 2011, Vol. 165, p. 58-59).
There are some missing facts in that NEHGR summary and some estimates that probably need to be revised. For example, the article estimates the date of William’s first marriage as 1821 - however, subsequent research suggests that his oldest daughter was Delilah (Bowen) Bodine Raymond, born in 1810. Also, the Census records for the William Bowen household put that family in Sempronius, Cayuga County, New York, as early as 1810, when William and his wife already had three daughters (one over 10 years of age - I think she might actually be a sister of William or Mary).
I started writing this post on the first of September 2024, and as I’ve been drafting, I have been updating William’s WikiTree profile so it tells more of his story and cites the sources I have. If you visit that link now, it should look a lot different from the screenshot I included above.
Perhaps next time the tide comes in, my Bowen family wavetop will reach further into the past. If you find yourself connected to William’s family, say hello!