A family history is only as good as its receipts. Everything on this site traces back to the records below, books, archives, DNA files and genealogical databases. Each one is described, linked where possible, and honestly rated. Where sources disagree, we say so.
Edward Francis Johnson (1934). The single most detailed narrative of the founding American line, 96 pages, straight from the town where it began.
Google Books →A meticulous, well-sourced site devoted to the 1820 plot, with Richard Tidd's biography, portrait and trial record. Vivid and rigorous.
catostreetconspiracy.org.uk →The landmark genetics paper behind the deep-ancestry chapter, how the English gene pool, and names like Tidd, actually formed.
Nature →Genealogy is detective work, and the trail is centuries cold. These are the places where good sources point in different directions, recorded here so future family historians know exactly what still needs nailing down.
For decades compiled trees named his parents as John Tidd and Agnes/Anna Dane of Hertford; in 2021 WikiTree's collaborators reviewed the claim, found it unsupported by any reliable source, and severed it. What the record does support (and Robert Charles Anderson's Great Migration project accepts) is a Hertfordshire life: children christened at Wheathampstead in 1622, 1624, 1626 and 1628 (Mary, Elizabeth, John and Samuel, per the 1995 family genealogy), and a tailor named "Tead" at Hertford about 1630. Margaret's maiden name ("Greenleaf" in family papers) is likewise unconfirmed. His death is recorded as both 1656 and 1657; his Woburn will settles it near April 1657. The parish registers of Hertfordshire are the deepest open dig for the next family historian.
Earlier drafts of this history assumed the direct line went west over the mountains to Ohio. Hudson's Lexington genealogy and the family's own memoir now show the real route: the line stayed in Lexington for two centuries, then jumped straight to Palmer, Nebraska (Charles Lowell Tidd, d. 1899), then Ceres, California. The Niles–Vienna Ohio Tidds documented by the Ohio book, whose compilers themselves warn of "errors and omissions that must be verified," are a separate cousin branch, as is the Eaton, N.Y. line traced in the "A Tidd Line" typescript.
Hudson gives the schoolmaster Charles Tidd's death as 27 April 1880; the 1995 family genealogy says 27 April 1881, and the town-meeting timeline (resolutions voted November 1881, adopted March 1882) fits 1881 better, so this site uses 1881. Hudson records Charles Lowell Tidd's wife as Helen A. Gookin (1866); the family genealogy remembers an Elizabeth and a Frances. And Esther's birth is 26 April 1841 in Hudson but 1842 in the family record; her own "five months after the 1840 letter" supports 1841. Small cracks, honestly logged.
SurnameDB gives two origins for "Tidd": an occupational one (a tid-man, head of a tithing) and a locational one (from the villages of Tydd). Both are pre-8th-century and plausible; the record doesn't decisively favour either.
Paul Roscher is remembered in the family as a WWII B-17 pilot. We have not yet located a public unit roster or service file confirming the details, so the verbatim excerpt in Chapter II is drawn from a different 91st Bomb Group airman's published account, used to illustrate the world he flew in, not as his own words. His record is a priority for the next edition; the Mighty Eighth veterans database is the place to confirm it.
Two neighbouring markers in the 9p21 heart region read inconsistently in Jon's raw data (a known "strand" quirk of consumer chips), and his APOE gene didn't read at all. The family trio fixed the APOE gap, both parents being ε3/ε3 makes Jon ε3/ε3 with certainty. It's a small case study in why testing relatives beats testing an individual.
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Family bibles, photographs, service files, a great-aunt's letters, every scrap makes the next edition truer. This page is built to grow.