Simeon Van Winkle Post

On Family Search there are two sets of parents for my one ancestor Simeon Van Winkle Post:

1)  John Bell Post (born about 1801 in Georgia) and Nancey Rigsby (born about 1794 prob in Georgia) or

2)  Cornelis Post (born 1796 in New Jersey) and Sarah Van Winkle (born about 1789 in New Jersey).

After looking through some census records and googling Simeon Van Winkle Post and Mary Kane I found that Cornelius Post and Sarah Van Winkle were in fact, Simeon’s parents.  I went into Simeon’s summary on new.familysearch.org

Then I clicked on “Combined Records” and it gave me this screen (below).  This shows all of the records that have been submitted and then combined into one individual.  There were about 30 records that were combined to make this one individual.

In a previous post I discussed the problem with Simeon’s multiple wives that appeared to be incorrectly linked to him.  I asked my family if they knew exactly who he was really married to.  My aunt responded with a lot of really interesting and useful information.  She told me that he was first married to Elizabeth Cochran (Corcoran) and raised two sons as his own (whether they were really his we don’t know).  He later married my ancestor Mary Kane and they had 5 children together. My aunt also told me about a book that was written about him and some of his ancestors called Sweet Tootin’.  With all of this information I went into the above combined records page and looked through each of the records.  I found that there seemed to be 2 distinct individuals that had been combined as one.  The other man that had been mistakenly combined with my ancestor was Simon Post born about 1823 in Alabama, he was married to the other 3 women that my ancestor Simeon was not married to.  I selected all of the records that corresponded to Simon Post of Alabama and then clicked separate records.  And voila!!  Problem solved.  Simeon is now only married to 2 women and has the correct number of children.  What a great feeling to have that all sorted out!!