Talk:Joseph Watson (mayor)

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There are a number of errors and inaccuracies on this page. I just created a page on wikitree for Joseph Watson with much better information at https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Watson-29647

I would update data here, but as I understand Wikipedia policy (possibly incorrectly), there are two things I'm not allowed to do:

use primary sources rather than secondary sources
use my own writing as a source.

Given that my work on wikitree largely used primary sources, I'm not sure what to do other than make this note here.

Some sample errors:

Cornelius Sinclair was about 10 years old so calling him a "man" seems inappropriate.
"Johnson and Tilghman were later freed" is both unclear since the only Johnson mentioned previously on the page was one of the perpetrators and also wrong because the Johnson who was one of the victims wasn't freed, he died and was buried in a shallow grave in Mississippi. This probably meant to say "Scomp and Tilghman were later freed", but that still would be wrong since Scomp and Tilghman were freed and returned to Philadelphia along with Alexander Manlove and Mary Fisher was freed at the same time but didn't return until later.
"able to get 10 kidnap victims released"...well, he noted that he'd saved 8 victims, and 2 more were expected to be returned, but there's some evidence that more may have been released later.
"he failed on two others"...not clear who these two others are as Watson provided a list of two dozen who he failed to locate.

Trinsics (talk) 17:50, 27 June 2021 (UTC)Reply

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