25 Feb 2009 Never Trust Wikipedia

On the Abigail Adams page, 2/25/09:

A cairn — a mound of rough stones — crowns the nearby Penn Hill from which she and her son, John Quincy, watched the Battle of Bunker Hill and the burning of Charlestown. At that time she was minding the children of Dr. Joseph Warren, President of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, who was killed in the battle.

Link from there to the Joseph Warren page, 2/25/09, which says:

At the time of Warren’s death, his children were staying with his fiancee, Mercy Scollay.

So where were his kids when hero, patriot and Founding Father Dr. Joseph Warren was killed? Beats me. Teach U.S. History says they were staying with his mother.

P.S. A little freaky. After writing the post above, but before posting it, I ran across this post on the Boston 1775 blog that not only compares the Wikipedia entries for Abigail Adams and Joseph Warren on the question of where the Warren children were staying during the Battle of Bunker Hill, but then also cites Teach U.S. History, as I did. If I hadn’t just written the post myself, I’d suspect myself of plagiarism! But my point holds, anyway, as Boston 1775 debunked Wikipedia’s Abigail Adams entry vis-a-vis the Warren children on August 2008, and yet, months later, the Wikipedia entries still have this unresolved conflict.

What’s even freakier is that I subscribed to the Boston 1775 blog on my Google Reader RSS reader early this morning, having never heard of it before today, yet I didn’t find this post about Warren via my RSS reader.