Edwards Genealogy of Colonial Virginia

When i think about people with hobbies like playing baseball, collecting coins, needlework, or even video gaming, I tend to think most people who spend some time on these things tend to be pretty good at it. After all, how long can you be awful at baseball before your teammates kick you out? For some reason, there don't seem to be any barriers for bad genealogists. The vast majority doing "research" online seem to simply be name collectors, content to pull together the research of others without checking their work and adding them to their own trees (bad enough) or publicly editable trees (even worse). Most seem to be extremely passive about their research, which is fine. But there are those who defiantly post old, badly supported theories continuously without doing a scrap of work themselves. I've found when I actually talk to the folks who are doing this, there are a couple of evident cognitive biases at work: Anchoring bias : when genealogists consider the first th...

I finally wrote a book compiling the research I've done on this family since January 2019. You can find uploaded at archive.org. Click here to go directly to it: The Descendants of Meredith Edwards of Westmoreland County, Virginia I've compiled all the evidence, sources, citations and research from quite a few different sources, explained why I think the relationships are what they are. Every single thing I've ever found on this family is here, so its 83 pages long. I think there is some historical imperative in getting this family right, since it did produce some fairly noteworthy early Americans, including Senator John Edwards (1748-1834), one of the first elected U.S. senators from Kentucky; his sons, Haden (1771-1849) and Benjamin (1780-1837) Edwards, whose Fredonian Rebellion (1826) sparked the Texas secession movement; Gen. John Edwards King (1757-1828), a military hero from Kentucky who served during the War of 1812; Ninian Edwards (1775-1833), governor of I...