Talk:Betty MacDonald

Cancer as the cause of death
Which kind of cancer did Betty MacDonald die of? Dexter Nextnumber (talk) 09:23, 30 November 2009 (UTC)

Persistent addition of improper unsourced trivia
The Betty MacDonald related pages, including this one, have been plagued by the persistent addition by various single-purpose accounts of material describing "interviews" conducted of MacDonald's sister by a purported journalist by the name of Wolfgang Hampel. The material is not properly included in this or in any of the articles for several reasons. First, it doesn't actually add anything - just that the sister told "entertaining stories". Second, it's tangential to the subject matter of any of these articles. Third, Wolfgang Hampel - whoever he is - does not appear to be a reliable source. Finally, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the material is being included simply to hawk the CD/DVD on which these purported interviews were included. (This entry has frequently been accompanied by links to commercial fansites.) Being trivial, tangential, unreliably sourced and for apparent commercial purposes, these edits are inappropriate and editors may expect that other editors or I will be removing them on sight - and any editor who attempts to force their inclusion risks being blocked. Thanks. JohnInDC (talk) 00:43, 19 May 2010 (UTC)

I don't agree. The Betty MacDonald interviews are well done. Betty MacDonald's youngest sister Alison Bard Burnett shares very important background info.

Stellamosley (talk) 00:06, 13 August 2012 (UTC)

Birth year and census records
I've just made a change of wording in the article on this point, and here's why: anybody who has done much research in family history, as I have, is aware that census records are very, very iffy sources. Time and again, in all parts of the country and all decades, they are off by a year or two from what I know to be correct dates for my own ancestors, from Bible records, tombstones, and other kinds of official documents.

Why this is I don't know, maybe the census takers had a different way of counting time - but it's just not right to use census records as being more definitive of someone's birth year than other official sources. Textorus (talk) 01:07, 26 March 2011 (UTC)


 * However, Paula Becker (Looking for Betty MacDonald. The Egg, the Plague, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, and I. University of Washington Press, Seattle und London 2016) cites baptismal records (baptized May 1907) and also points out that Betty's younger brother was born in Nov. 1908 which makes it highly improbable that Betty Bard was born in March 1908 (see loc. cit., p. 9 and 10).--Mautpreller (talk) 14:16, 24 January 2018 (UTC)