Talk:Henry Watterson

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more work needed[edit]

This afternoon while in a library waiting for an audiobook to download, I was going to revise this article enough to remove the minimal citation header. I soon noticed that both father's and son's wikipedia articles refer to the first volume of the son's autobiography (Marse Henry), available on DocSouth's usually reliable website, but the father's article has the dead link, and this the live ones, although the whole autobiography is either arguably not or only tangentially mentioned in the current text. Frankly, I was going to do a quick fix and just indicate the number of slaves the son owned per the U.S. Census. Unfortunately, ancestry.com seems to have changed its website (at least for the library edition) at some time during the past week, so it no longer quickly links many sources for historical figures (like Appleton's Cyclopedia and Congressional bios, together with marriage, census and usually findagrave records). The census search has to be done separately. For what its worth, the linked 1860 census slave schedules for District 8, Hawkins County, Tennessee show Henry as owning 3 slaves, but ancestry.com's metadata indicates he owned 20 slaves, which IMHO is a significant difference. I suspect it's either caused by misreading of handwriting for Henry and Harvey and/or him leasing out slaves in various nearby counties. My audiobook's now downloaded and I have lots else to do, so I have no idea when or if I'll finish this update. I including a link to the imperfect Kentucky Encyclopedia and Tennesee Encyclopedia articles, but don't have time to do more.Jweaver28 (talk) 21:33, 4 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Census records are unacceptable as a wikipedia citation. So is findagrave for that matter, but a census record particularly so. The Henry Watterson living in Hawkins County, TN in 1860 was born in 1795, and is absolutely not the same person. Hawkins county is in north-east TN, well outside the region the subject of this article was located. Kintpuash (talk) 21:23, 10 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]