Talk:Eric Pålsson Mullica

Conflicting source
This isn't a book on New Sweden so I'm distrustful of its accuracy, but "Patriots, Pirates, and Pineys: Sixty Who Shaped New Jersey" has a short blurb on Mullica, but gives rather different dates. It doesn't mention anything about Mullica's first marriage, and also says he arrived in America in 1638 at the age of 15 - rather than being born in 1636 (the current article), a gap of 13 years. The book also says he died in 1723 at the age of 100, not "before 1704." It's clearly talking about the same person, though. Did scholarship advance a lot when Peterson wrote his book? Or was Peterson just wrong and lazy and making stuff up? SnowFire (talk) 04:28, 7 December 2020 (UTC)
 * I found the same dates that Peterson gives given in this (archive) book (Alfred M. Heston, 1924, South Jersey: A History, 1664-1924; Heston also has Mullica moving to the Mullica/Little Egg Harbor River in 1645, which Henry Charlton Beck's book on the Mullica River from 1945 repeats). Information close to that in the current article (his family arrived in America in 1654, he died "soon after 1700") is given by Peter S. Craig (1999), 1671 Census of the Delaware, p. 15 (archive) (for this information he cites his own 1693 Census of the Swedes on the Delaware, which I couldn't find online), and in an article here (archive) the same author gives a similar birth date to that in the current article ("c. 1637") and exactly the same death date. If Craig is correct, that seems to indicate that scholarship had advanced but Peterson got his dates from older sources. -- LaetusStudiis (talk) 07:52, 16 November 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks for looking into this! I would absolutely trust Craig over older sources - Peterson (author of the book above) is not a very good source (he's a private school operator, not a historian), so him using older sources which had different dates would explain things.  I'm kinda curious now how the older sources got things so wrong - record-keeping wasn't THAT bad in colonial times, which is why I boggled at how such a big disconnect could get started to begin with - but so it is.  SnowFire (talk) 08:09, 16 November 2021 (UTC)