Talk:Walter William Covey-Crump

Genealogical details

Paused

Moving the below content to talk for the moment per WP:NOTGENEALOGY - should future research determine, as has been speculated, that some of these details are relevant to understanding the name change, then they can be moved back at that time. Nikkimaria (talk) 00:14, 31 July 2022 (UTC)

• William Crump (born Condover c. 1807)
• Ann Crump wife of William Crump (born Much Wenlock c. 1809)
• Richard Crump (Pitchford 1836 – Kings Norton 1902). Deaths Dec 1902 Crump Richard 68 King's N. 6c 252.
• Elizabeth Prstidge Crump wife of William Crump (born Birmingham c. 1842)
• Reverend Richard Covey (Birmingham c. 1833 – Cambridge 2 August 1903). Deaths Sep 1903 Covey Richard 69 Cambridge 3b 246. Probate 23 October 1903 Peterborough, £1502 to Rev. Gee and McMurray, tailor.
• Covey was the son of Charles Covey (c. 1799-1875). (See GRO Deaths Mar 1875 Covey Charles 79 Winchcombe 6a 341). surgeon to the Birmingham Dispensary.
• Hilda Sophia Crump née Porter (Haddenham 1879 – Ely 1968). Births Sep 1879 Porter Hilda Sophia Ely (which includes Haddenham) 3b 539. Deaths Jun 1968 Covey-Crump Hilda S. 88 Ely 4A 306.
• Rogers Covey-Crump is the grandson of Walter William Covey-Crump, via W.W. Covey-Crump's son, musician Lewis Charles Leslie Covey-Crump (1904–1962). GRO Births Jun 1904 Covey-Crump Lewis C. L. (mother Hilda Sophia nee Porter) Luton 3b 395. Marriages Jun 1930 Covey-Crump Lewis C. L. (wife nee Edwards) St Albans 3a 2293. Births Mar 1944 Covey-Crump Rogers H. L. (mother nee Edwards) St. Albans 3a 2086.

References

The above are notes, not references. The material in the article is backed up by citations already. This is not genealogy. Genealogy is the research of ancestry for its own sake only. This material is not there for that reason. Firstly, in a biography, it is always useful to know whether the subject has achieved their notability due to to an advantageous background, or because they achieved what they did against the odds (e.g. no money, no proper education, no help etc), or some other reason. It makes a difference if a thief or top business-person (could be both!) has had a very rich or very poor background. You can't normally note that their parents could be rich or poor, but you can say who the parents were and what their job/profession was (if they had one). It is therefore massively important to know that this subject's grandparents were agricultural labourers (mostly very poor and uneducated in the UK in those days), and for that information we have to identify them and include information for that.

This man spawned a family of musicians - one very successful. That is not unconnected from the fact that W.W.C-C put all three of his sons into choir school. One of those sons put his own son into choir school, and that one ended up famous for his music. All this is connected. It is short-sighted to hide information which connects across other articles. I am still working on this, so please kindly do not confuse matters by removing material and rehashing it in a different form and a disconnected manner, on the talk page.

There is another matter - that is the elephant in the room which we cannot speak of, because this set of articles is about people who have living descendants, and our rules say quite rightly that we must not offend. I cannot write that stuff in the article, though any fool checking all the notes will soon read between the lines and spot it. WWC-C paid dearly for his career, though he had no money, and so did his fellow curates. Sometimes creators of articles need compassion and and understanding, and there are things that we can never say. What we can do is to put all information into the article, and leave it up to the reader to understand or not, as they wish. We already understand the name change perfectly clearly. We just can't write it. It's partly in the notes which you removed. It is not synthesis, because nothing has been put side by side to reveal the editor's speculations. It's not OR, because no conclusions have been drawn from primary sources in the article. Only people intending to look for that sort of thing will find it if they pay the subscriptions, purchase the information, and put two and two together themselves. What we can say, is that the name change was not caused by a clause in the will, because there was no such clause in the will. (But there are other things in the will, and in other places, which I have not mentioned). Storye book (talk) 09:44, 31 July 2022 (UTC)

Readers should not have to dig up someone else's will (!) to understand the relevance of facts presented in the article.

Our rules do not say we must not offend - quite the opposite. If the "elephant" is relevant to an encyclopedic understanding of the topic and can be appropriately sourced, it should be included; if not, it should be excluded rather than obliquely hinted at. Nikkimaria (talk) 00:21, 1 August 2022 (UTC)

I have made it clear above that no offensive issues have been obliquely hinted at in the article. If you think that, please show us the bit of the article which contains oblique hints about something which may offend. Regarding the will, in the UK it is easy to access it via the General Record Office by searching for the probate. It costs around £1.50.

It is perfectly acceptable on WP to provide citations which are not immediately available via one click, e.g. citations from offline books and other printed publications. All or most of the notes/citations which you have listed above are backups for the secondary sources which support the article's text. Dyer, for example, was from a younger generation who never knew WWC-C. Secondary sources are notorious for getting birth-dates and family relationships wrong. This article contains statements which are backed up by Dyer's booklet, and although he is most certainly a professional historian and reputable source, he still needs checking out.

A.J.P. Taylor said on the radio just before he died, as a message for those historians who may follow him, to "verify your references". He explained that among historians there has always been a tendency to copy references from each other without checking the original source. He cited cases where a reference had been copied by top historians for a hundred years or more, and when Taylor checked it back to the original source, there was either no source, or a source which did not support the facts that the reference had been traditionally used for.

For that reason, I always try to check out secondary-source statements about origins and relationships of individuals, because that is one thing that I can check, and have therefore checked out secondary sources by providing those sources which you object to, because you do not know why they are there. Well, that is why they are there.

I do not trust secondary sources to get that kind of detail right. Dyer says that Rogers Covey-Crump is WWC-C's grandson. That is correct, and I have shown that that is correct in the last source which you mention above. I have purchased the certificates at my own cost (about five, at £11 each), and provided the information from them here, for free.

In the past, I have found far too many secondary sources which get BMD dates wrong because the "authoritative" historian has got a person mixed up with someone else, or it's a printer's typo and proofreaders can't check numbers, and I find that out by purchasing the certificates (and backing that up with other sources too), correcting the information, giving my sources, and giving our readers the benefit of that work and expense for free. Our readers are then in a position to check the facts out too. So you see, all this is done for a reason. There is no random detail here.

Professional researchers may come to us for a first-stop answer to their question "who/what on earth is this thing that I've never heard of?" and what they want from us is not our text, but our sources. Our sources are the real value which we can pass on to serious researchers. And they will want to have all our sources, and they will check them out – properly. Those are ultimately our most important readers, because they sometimes use us as a first stop for the furtherance of world knowledge. If we are to be part of that chain, we should make available all our sources. Storye book (talk) 06:50, 1 August 2022 (UTC)

This line of argument represents a fundamental misunderstanding of what Wikipedia is. As an encyclopedia Wikipedia summarizes reliable secondary sources; it's not a place to analyze primary sources to determine the accuracy of secondary sources. It is also written for a generalist reader, so genealogical data about people other than the subject for serious researchers who might want to track down those primary sources is intricate detail only of interest to a particular audience.

Similarly this line of argument is a misunderstanding. It is correct to say that a single person cannot resolve a multiperson discussion by themselves - but that applies equally to both sides. Tagging is, as noted, an interim step pending resolution of the discussion one way or the other. While I appreciate you do not share the concern flagged by that template, it's also not appropriate for you to unilaterally remove the tag while this disagreement remains unresolved. Nikkimaria (talk) 00:01, 2 August 2022 (UTC)

Checking of secondary sources and looking at the subject's parents and grandparents: This has value to a large proportion of our readers. A large portion of those interested in the article are Freemasons, of which there are six million worldwide. WWC-C's books on Masonic ritual are still being reprinted for study, and the article is of interest to Freemasons who want to know who created that historical analysis of their ritual and what were his qualifications for doing that. That includes his background, and that includes his ancestors. It is difficult for people in the West today to comprehend the importance of family background in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but it was of major import. This man, whose grandparents were ag labs, and whose father ran a coopering (barrel-making) business was a serious academic, likely fluent in Latin and Greek if you read his books, and he has stamped his academic mark on the ritual history of the Freemasons. So yes, that group will be seriously interested in everything in the article, they will want to be able to check it out, and there are an awful lot of them.

Then there is the fact that he was an Anglican clergyman (there's about 85 million Anglicans!), and there is a great deal of research going on regarding the clerical history of that church. Where those clergy came from is extremely important, because they influenced the culture of the UK for centuries. At the beginning of the 19th century, a high proportion of them were Oxbridge graduates, and to be Oxbridge graduates in those days, they had to come from rich families. Only a small proportion of British families could afford to pay for university education. Some clergy were very rich - the beginning of the 19th century saw the last of the so-called prince bishops. That is why vicarages built in the 19th century are so big that most of them have now had to be sold off by the church - present clergy cannot afford to live in them. They were built for clergy from rich families.

So it is extremely important to examine an example of one of the clergymen of poor background who emerged in the latter half of the nineteenth century. These were educated for free at specially-built establishments, paid for by benefactors. There was much competition for this rare chance of a top education, and successful entrants had to be top scholars. They were not there primarily to learn to do pastoral work. This was an academic grounding at a high level. That WWC-C got in was a great achievement. Understanding this pattern of his early life explains why he ended up as a Canon, a researcher, and a man who put all his sons into not just any choir school, but one whose attached prep school would give them the best chance of a university scholarship. The article reveals the pattern of just one lifetime spent by a clergyman in that environment - that of a poor boy catapaulted into academia and going on to justify it by becoming an canon and doing research. Anglican clergy are quite different now - in general there is more concentration on pastoral work today. So this is a historical example which is of use to those researchers who want to examine the historical progress of Anglican clergy's relationship to local people and the world at large.

Then there is the change in historical attitude about family in the UK. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, your family background had a major effect on how people treated you. In the 19th century, if you were formally introduced to someone new, they would want to know who your father was, etc. This was one of their ways of judging whether you were respectable and whether you would fit in, class-wise. This is a historical article, dealing with that era, and we must bear that in mind. We cannot inflict our own modern points of view onto the past, by saying that parentage of people of that era did not matter. Parentage was everything. I repeat, of course that is not the case today, but we are dealing with UK history here.

WWC-C had to completely change his background culture to live the clerical life that he did. He almost certainly had to change his dialect, the way that he behaved, and what he wore. He was stepping into a world where, within living memory, most clergy were from rich and privileged backgrounds, and he had to do that with everyone knowing who his family were. So, to appreciate what he went through, and what he achieved in spite of his modest background, we need to know the facts. The article does no more than state the facts and give verifiable citations for it. Researchers like those I have described above will certainly want to check the facts.

As for repeated tagging of articles, using tags to ask editors to majorly change or adjust the article, before the talkpage discussion has ended - that is not on and should STOP NOW. You have already repeatedly done that on Constantine Zochonis, asking editors to merge or delete the article, when you have been unable to win the argument about it on the talk page there. Every time I take the construction tag down after improving that article, you put that same merge tag up. and you are doing that repeatedly, knowing not only that that article fulfils all WP requirements for a stand-alone article, but that if merged with the much smaller and weaker article PZ Cussons it would smother that article inappropriately. You are repeatedly tagging that article with a demand for a merger that should not and cannot be done. And now, here, you are tagging the article because you have not read my arguments and you do not understand the historical import of the contents of the article, even though I have spent a great deal of time explaining it all to you at length. You are repeating a pattern which does not help you, and it does not help WP. This behaviour has to STOP NOW. Just walk away, and don't get yourself into an edit war. You have already been spoken-to, about your behaviour on your talkpage, by Hammersoft. Storye book (talk) 09:19, 2 August 2022 (UTC)

I understand that you feel passionately about the subject, and that that passion may be clouding your perspective here and leading you to respond with anger. However, again, your characterizations do not accurately represent the situation, either here or at Constantine Zochonis (although that matter is best discussed at that article's talk page).

Tagging does not require that a talk-page discussion has concluded, because a talk-page discussion should not conclude with a decision to just tag the article and nothing more. That is why it is called out as an alternative to reverting while discussion is ongoing. I appreciate you don't agree that the issue flagged by the tag is of concern, but that's what this conversation is meant to determine, and the tag should remain in place until that happens.

I also appreciate that you've immersed yourself in the historical context of this individual, and so have a more nuanced perspective on what sorts of information might be of interest to people in a similar niche. But again, genealogy is not what we're here for. There are other venues that would be more appropriate for that kind of detail. In what specific parish his grandfather was born or the profession of his mentor's father is information that is not useful for the general reader.

Perhaps an RfC would be a useful next step? I would be happy to collaborate on wording. Nikkimaria (talk) 22:04, 2 August 2022 (UTC)

You have not read my explanations, and you have misrepresented my attitude and the article itself. I have not written in an angry manner here. My language, meaning and intention are controlled. This is not about anger. There is frustration, that you cannot understand what I have taken great pains to explain, nothing more in the area of emotion on my part.

Tagging can be useful in the manner that you describe, but it depends on the wording of the tag. On Constantine Zochonis the tag asks editors to merge or majorly change the article, which is what you want to happen, is not what ought to happen, and it pre-empts any conclusion to the discussion on the talk page. Similarly, the tag that you put on this article asks editors to remove what you call excessive detail, when all information in the article, including the notes and citations, is there to contribute positively to the biography. There are tags, and there are tags. Some tags are inappropriately coercive while a discussion is still underway, and could even kick-start an edit war.

Your comment about genealogy and using other venues is inappropriate here, and you would know that if you had read the biography, and my explanations here. The subject of the biography is a boy from a poor background who made good. That is not nuanced, and it is not personal to the editor. It's a typical Dick-Whittington type of story, although less extreme. You can't show that the subject is a poor boy made good unless you give evidence for that. Childhood poverty means (at least comparatively) poor parents, so in that sort of biography you have to show comparatively poor parents, who could not have enabled their child to achieve what he did achieve.

To understand the subject, you have to understand their background, especially in a historical article where the social and financial situation was different from today. That type of understanding is not about genealogy per se, and information which supports that understanding should not be removed just on the grounds that it contains the words "parent" and "grandparent" or similar. It's the context and purpose which counts. To do that, we have to identify the immediate ancestors and their jobs. If they were London barristers, the biography would be telling a different story, and we would understand the biography subject differently, because our biog. subject would have books at home and money for university. But they were agricultural labourers and coopers in a village, and our biography subject had to pull himself up by his own bootstraps.

And don't ever accuse me of inappropriate immersion in article subjects. I write about all sorts of subjects, and I cannot be personally involved in all of them, can I, because they are all so different. Regarding this one, during most of my lifetime Freemasonry has been culturally inaccessible to me - and as it happens I do not admire their ritual or philosophy, in spite of the charity work that they say they do. Neither do I have any religion. However the world contains all sorts, we must respect all sorts and see them as part of world history. I don't have to be part of a subject's world, or like it, to be able to write about it, and think it worthy of study. If I have any passion in the matter, it is for common sense, clarity and truth - no more and no less than most other editors here.

WP rules should be used with commensense - that is one of the rules. Just step away, Nikkimaria, you are not helping yourself or WP here. Storye book (talk) 09:06, 3 August 2022 (UTC)

I have indeed read your explanations. I found in them not a common-sense application of rules, but rather a fundamental disagreement with them. More importantly, what I did not find in them was a convincing argument as to why these specific details (which go beyond simply saying the subject came from a modest background, including some unrelated to that topic) are beneficial for the average reader of a generalist encyclopedia. I recognize that you feel they are, which is why I suggested an RfC - to get a broader set of perspectives on the matter. I'm still happy to work with you on developing an RfC question, but that process will need to be more collaborative than adversarial.

With regards to tagging, I cannot agree with your characterizations. But if you don't care for the wording of either of the tags that you have reverted from this article, what is an example of the other "sort" of tag that might be included while discussion is ongoing here? Nikkimaria (talk) 23:58, 3 August 2022 (UTC)

I do not disagree with WP rules in principle. There are some individual rules which I may disagree with, but in those case I accept that my edits may be removed, e.g. in the case of citations of Billion Graves and IMDb, but those two don't apply here because they are not in the article. I think you'll find that most editors have some quibbles about one or more rules; that is normal human nature, and that is why the rules are adjusted and improved from time to time.

There is no rule which says that an editor may not back up secondary-source citations, where those secondary citations are the ones which are supporting the text. The rules are about not using primary sources as citations to directly support the text. In the case of this article, the primary sources are refn notes, not citations, and they check out and back up the secondary sources, which are the ones which support the text.

The first four of the notes which you removed are identifications of the parents and grandparents, so that the census can be checked for those individuals, and their trades may be seen there, and that in turn demonstrates the modest environment in which WWC-C grew up, and from which he managed to improve his lot. The information is here because the parents and grandparents are not about ancestry per se. They are about the social, educational and financial environment in which WWC-C was born and grew up, i.e. the people who looked after him and brought him up to be a cooper.

The fifth and sixth notes which you have listed above are identifications of Richard Covey, because he is the main part of the story of how the Covey-Crump surname came about, therefore it matters who and what he was. It tells us when he died - which is part of the evidence for the date of the name change. It tells us who and what he was (a curate and son of a surgeon, and therefore of middling income). The probate tells us how much money he left, because money is part of the reason for the name change, and also the main reason for WWC-C's academic start in life. Covey was his sponsor for education and clerical training, and he was his financial sponsor just after WWC-C married. Covey explains most of the creation of WWC-C's academic and literary life, so he counts, in the biography of WWC-C. We need to know exactly who and what he was. Of course that raises more questions, but I can only use facts for which we have citations, and support for those citations.

The seventh note which you list above, is the identification of WWC-C's wife. In all biographies, if the subject has a spouse or partner, we identify that spouse or partner if we can, whether or not that spouse/partner has their own article, and we add citations and supporting information if we have it. That is normal, and there is no rule against identifying a spouse or partner in the main text. Wives of 19th-and early 20th-century Anglican clergymen were as important as the clergyman was, to the parish. They did literally half the work. The only thing they didn't do was the sermon. They played the organ/piano/harmonium, they did half (or more of) the pastoral work, they organised functions, they were hosts for events, they provided food for events, and so on. It was very difficult for an Anglican clergyman to function without a wife in that era, because they had to be able to afford to pay someone to do half their job, which could be onerous in some parishes. Yet they were ignored by the diocese, to the extent that if the clergyman died at his post, the wife had no financial support, and was made immediately homeless so that the next vicar could live there. Without other relatives to turn to, she had nothing, and could die in poverty. The very least we can do in those circumstances is to identify her.

The eighth and last note in your list above is the explanation of how exactly Rogers Covey-Crump is the grandson of W.W. Covey-Crump, who had three sons. That is a living person, and we must get the evidence for the citation right. There is no pointless genealogy here, which is why that bit is specifically pointing to the exact relationship between grandfather and grandson. Dyer states that Rogers is W.W.'s grandson, but he does not say from which of W.W. sons he is descended. That matters, because Rogers in fact descends from the musical line in the family, i.e. Lewis Charles Leslie the musician. (Lewis has notability himself, regarding a specific "first" performance, and I'm currently investigating the viability of an article about him).

The first of the references in your above list is the newspaper death notice of Covey - secondary-source evidence for the date of death, which is part of the evidence for the date of the name-change, which is supported by the refn notes. The second reference is Census information about Covey's profession: a clergyman. The third reference in your above list is the secondary-source citation for the date of death of Covey, and also for the fact that his father was a surgeon. In other words, this is what sort of man initiated the existence of the Covey-Crump surname, and 1903 is when he did it. That is, of course, an oversimplification of the biographical story, but I'm talking about the citations for those facts which I can use in the article.

Therefore the notes and references which you list above are not in any way unrelated to the topic, i.e. the biography, and they do not break any rules. In fact, removing those notes and references would create a breaking of the rules, because evidence for some facts would be then missing.

Regarding tags. We don't need a tag while this discussion is ongoing. Either there is something wrong with the article, or there isn't. You think there is something wrong; I believe that there is not anything wrong. If you upload a tag, you are saying that there is something wrong, i.e. you are encouraging others to carry out your wishes in that vein. Therefore there should be no tag, because a tag in this case would be coercive on your part.

As for an RfC, that would be a waste of everyone's time, bearing in mind that there is nothing wrong with the article. Just step away, NIkkimaria. I have answered all your questions in full, and explained everything several times and at great length. There is no crime being committed in this article. Storye book (talk) 09:50, 4 August 2022 (UTC)

The identification of the parents and grandparents and census entries for their professions are already included separately from those notes. So too is the identification of Covey as a curate and educational sponsor (and for that matter what he left in his will, in another note), and the name of the wife. The specific relationship to the grandson is also included, although if it is not supported by the secondary source that definitely needs to go along with the note per WP:BLPPRIMARY.

On that note, you state above that the secondary sources are the ones which directly support the text but then go on to say that removing these notes would leave some facts missing evidence. Are there other details in the article text (besides the relationship to the grandson) supported only by the primary sources? I specify that because some of what you have outlined above is not in the article, presumably because (as you quite rightly point out) we can only include facts for which we have citations. Unfortunately that means that some of the specific detail in the notes that is not already in the text remains of no clear relevance to the average reader.

As to your final points: We have established at great length that you believe there is nothing wrong with the article. At the moment though we have not achieved any consensus either way, and the onus to achieve consensus is on those seeking to include disputed content. Nikkimaria (talk) 01:23, 5 August 2022 (UTC)

You are tying yourself in knots, looking for trouble that does not exist. The more I try to explain to you, the more you twist the explanation itself into an imaginary sin in the article. I repeat, as I have explained at great length above, several times, that the facts in the article are supported by secondary sources, and that includes the relationship between Crump and his grandson. And I never said that that was not the case. Please don't make things up. I have already explained at great length the validity of the content which you dispute. The items which you list above would have no relevance to the average reader in the out-of-context form in which you have listed them. In the article it makes sense. It made more sense before you removed valid material from the main text (diff). I had to move that material into the refn notes to keep the peace rather than revert - so yes, you yourself have contributed to the way in which that material has been pushed out of context. This was a cohesive article until you did that. Please stop this provocative behaviour, Nikkimaria. Please step away. No crime has been committed by me in this article.

Please stop goading me with different complaints every single day. Every day I wake up to find a different accusation on this page, which you kindly contextualise as "the onus to achieve consensus is on those seeking to include disputed content". That rule was not created to gratify people who want to goad innocent editors into feeling that they have to defend a perfectly legal article, so please stop misusing it on this talkpage. I am sick and tired of seeing different accusations against me, from you alone, every day since 31 July. This has to stop because you are now causing me distress. You are doing this to an ordinary dedicated editor who does their best to produce the best-quality articles that they can, and who has no bad intentions in creating those articles - just like plenty of other editors. Your behaviour is unjustified, and even if it is not intended to provoke, that is the effect that it has. If there had been a real crime committed here, such as copyvio, then a complaint would not be a problem, and we all know how to put copyvio right, and we all agree on it. But the matter that brought you to this talkpage is so minimal as to be pointless, and you have dragged it out and stretched it out into false accusations. THIS BEHAVIOUR HAS TO STOP NOW. Please step away. Storye book (talk) 09:00, 5 August 2022 (UTC)

My intention is not to goad you but simply to try to understand what's going on with the conflicting statements made. But clearly this discussion cannot be productive while you are so upset - I'm sorry that this seems to be distressing you terribly. Let's pick this up at a later date once you've had an opportunity to step back and take a break. Nikkimaria (talk) 00:03, 6 August 2022 (UTC)