Talk:Wolcott Gibbs

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Bibliography[edit]

I have commenced a tidy-up of the Bibliography section using cite templates. Capitalization and punctuation follow standard cataloguing rules in AACR2 and RDA, as much as Wikipedia templates allow it. ISBNs and other persistent identifiers, where available, are commented out, but still available for reference. This is a work in progress; feel free to continue. Sunwin1960 (talk) 02:29, 11 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Ancestry[edit]

The article's § Early life currently contains this claim:

...through his maternal grandmother, he was a direct descendant of U.S. President Martin Van Buren.

The assertion is backed up by two citations. One is a bare-text reference to a book published in 1891, the other is to an online "Ancestry of George W. Bush", of all things.

The citation is apparently making reference to a couple of lines in the extended lineage information near the bottom of the page. There, Gibbs' maternal grandmother is listed as one Anna Vanderpool Van Buren. But her name is the only mention of a Van Buren or even a Vanderpool in that entire data dump, which provides no connection to Martin Van Buren. And approaching it from the other direction, no Anna Vanderpool Van Buren is listed in our Family of Martin Van Buren article. It all just feels sort of flimsy.

I'm not saying the article's claim isn't correct that his grandmother Anna (and therefore Wolcott) is related to President Van Buren. Merely that it feels way too much like WP:SYN / WP:OR to be making that claim, based on what's actually verifiable using the citations provided. -- FeRDNYC (talk) 14:20, 23 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]