Talk:William Duckett (Calne MP, died 1686)

Kenwg (talk) 02:45, 21 April 2019 (UTC)

I just deleted a completely speculative, not just unsupported but disproven (and even irrelevant to the subject) edit from someone (User:Icairns 2) claiming that DNA evidence indicates there may have been an undocumented son of William Duckett (Richard Duckett, progenitor of a line of Ducketts in North America). Not only is a DNA "match" through a given ancestral pair so distantly removed (300 plus years, and 12+ generations) to a known descendant of that pair impossible to prove (to isolate, from the 8,000 or so other possible ancestral pairs, most of them unknown, that may also be the source of the match), there is positive documentary proof - from several sources - that all confirm that William Duckett had *only* one son, Lyonel Duckett: William Duckett's will naming only the one son Lyonel, his son Lyonel's headstone that also names him as William's only son, Williams marriage contract with his third wife, Margaret Moore, that confirms that he previously had only one son (Lyonel, with his first wife Elizabeth Henshaw), and that third wife Margaret Moore's will, which names only her children with her first husband; none - no children at all - with William Duckett.

This kind of misinformed genealogical speculation unfortunately is common from people anxious to establish a genealogical link, however tenuous, to ancestors with royal or aristocratic heritage, and willing to contaminate the historical record with their groundless speculation wherever possible. And in fact even the claim that William Duckett could claim descent from a royal line - in fact a very fabulous royal line - has been disproven. It was based on shoddy research by an earlier researcher who missed a marriage record that disproved a claimed marriage of William's ancestor Stephen Duckett to Anne, the daughter of Humphrey Baskerville, of Erdisley, descendant of the royal line. But that Humphrey's daughter Anne married a Welshman named William Havard - the marriage record, and ancestral record, and the record of their descendants, exists and is well-documented. The Anne Baskerville who married William's ancestor Stephen Duckett was the daughter of another Humphery Baskerville, Humphrey Baskerville of Wolverley, Alderman of London, who married Jane Packington. That Humphrey, of Wolverley, was descended from an old cadet line of Baskervilles that did not inherit the royal lineage.

In the interest of historical accuracy it's important to be diligent in purging this kind of self-aggrandizing misinformation wherever it appears.

UPDATE: The Duckett DNA Project paternal DNA results for descendants of Richard Duckett of Maryland do *not* match any other known Duckett lineage. https://www.familytreedna.com/public/Duckett/default.aspx?section=yresults Kenwg (talk) 06:00, 29 April 2019 (UTC)