Emma Walchelin de Normandy

Hi Janice. If it's a question about Richard of Normandy's children, then Private User is the best person I know to ask.

What is your source that Emma was a daughter of Richard, and also that she was a wife of Walchelin de Ferrers (actually, there were several Walchelin de Ferrers, so we need to know which one as well)?

By the way, it would be good to tag the profile in question:

Emma Walchelin de Ferrers

Thanks for tagging - I always forget.
I don't have any sources for Emma - quite the opposite; Richard didn't have any daughters named Emma who married a de Ferrers and was mother to Henry de Ferrers. I've seen her in so many profiles, and it makes all those paths back to generations before her wrong. I used the fmg, just like everyone else does. Plus using every search combination I could think of. Somewhere along the way, someone (lots of someones, including me probably) made a wrong merge, and this woman who didn't exist (this name, at least in the time period given) shows up as being daughter to Richard II the Good of Normandy.
As of now, the path has changed, so I guess the merges are being undone although I still see her as being mother of Henri de Ferrers and daughter of Richard, where the fmg clearly states that the names of his daughters are unknown, and none of them married a de Ferrers. Sorry, I feel as though I'm stuck in a loop here.
I have contacted Anne about questions such as these, but have never heard back from her.
Thanks.

Hi again, Janice. Yes, we are trying, slowly but surely, to clean up these questions. We are not so quick to totally delete people who are questionable, though, since even Charles Cawley (who wrote the FMG Medieval Lands database) acknowledges that his work is incomplete. So until someone provides proof against something, or even that it's higly unlikely, it's sometimes best to mark that relationship as questionable out of respect for the people who put it there. Notes in the About Me are very helpful. As a curator, I make these decisions on a case by case basis.

I cannot find any evidence for Emma either, and even her name is suspicious because Walchelin de Ferrers was a man's name (several men, in fact) and so it is not likely that she would have adopted that name. Unless possibly she was a *daughter* of a Walchelin de Ferrers.

So I'll keep an eye on her. I'd hoped Anne Marit would be able to help but she has not been on Geni for a while because of her health, I think. In the meantime, please contact me directly if you have any Anglo-Norman questions and I and the other curators working in this area will try to work them out. Thanks for your diligent eye!

Thanks, Pam. Using the fmg and whatever other sources I could find, even without Emma Walchelin de Normandy, Henri de Ferrers wasn't a grandson of Richard II 'The Good' of Normandy.

Sometimes Geni is just too slow to open for me.

I wish there were a Family History Center nearby our house, where I could access microfilms, although I doubt even LDS has films of records going back that far (but they could!). I've only ever used them for more recent years.

Good luck with all these projects ~ if I can manage to get a new, faster computer this year, I'll try to join in. I love to research!

And we need more good researchers on our medieval team! Sorry to hear your computer is slow. Is it the computer or the internet connection?

I'd love a good guide to these French naming conventions. Do we have one already linked into our names projects?

Also, I personally hate having unsubstantiated relationships maintained Pam, but I guess you're saying leave and mark as unsubstantiated. Including extraneous children that come from no where like Alice's non-existent other brother?

Hatte, there's a difference between

(1) unsubstantiated children who clearly belong elsewhere--usually they have multiple parents and you can easily find through some quick research where they really belong. They end up in the wrong family through bad merges somewhere up the line, usually in marriages between parents that are incorrect,

and

(2) unsubstantiated children who are on the tree but do not seem to belong anywhere else. THESE are the ones that clearly came from *some* source--we just don't know where--and so out of respect for the people who put them on their tree, they are the ones who I would not delete but would mark as questionable and note that some substantiation is needed.

We are not in a final cutting and pruning stage to create definitive family trees--we are now in a grouping and sorting stage, where we try to make sure that all the profiles in Geni have a proper home. It's those in category (2) in the historical tree--the ones who seem to have come out of nowhere--that need more investigation. It may be that somewhere out there, there is documentation for them, but we just haven't found it yet.

I'm going to copy and cross post this in the more general Anglo-Norman thread. Let's move our discussion over there, since this is not just about Emma but about our process.

Pam, it's definitely the computer that's slow - 6 years old now and lots of graphics on it. I do photo restoration so have lots of pics stored, and pics open most of the time.