Last year we mentioned Sherlock Holmes telling his faithful sidekick, Mr. Watson, that often the key to a case may be the dog that doesn't bark.

Our days have been filled with records that do not mention Maria Catherine BEST when they should mention her, family histories that don't mention or prove her parentage, cyber claims that are not worth the bandwidth required to download them.

What are the silent sentinels in the case of Maria Catherine "Best"?  The will of her supposed father, William Best, Sr., does not mention her.  True, the middle children are not named but there is nothing in the record to indicate any propinquity between William Best, Sr., and Maria Catherine (__) Silvius.

Another sentinel is the fact that Maria Catherine has none of the Best family as sponsors in the baptisms of her children.  None of them have her as their sponsor either.

The usual practice in German families was to name the third son after the mother’s father, and yet I see no William among the children of Maria Catherine and Nicholas.  (I see Henry and Jonas and Nicholas.)

The accepted theory when traced back is based solely on the memory of someone’s grandmother long after the time when William Best, Sr., would have been in the memory of the living.  The person who put forth this theory has been found to have numerous errors in other research which is a muffled omen.  We have ignored all these things at our own peril.

It is time to erase the board and start over in proving the parentage of Maria Catherine Silvius.  Perhaps by the process of elimination we can find where she truly fits.  This is made more difficult by the fact that her grave is gone and it might have shed light on the exact date of her birth.  Also the fact that she is a female makes the task even more daunting.

Several people joined the DAR based on Nicholas’s service and added her maiden name in as a collateral item, not necessarily researched or deemed necessary to membership, and these same people included another erroneous maiden name in the maternal line of Elizabeth (Sober), so this is a wordless warning that we have tended to ignore.

It is painful to give up a gr-gr-gr-gr-grandparent and try to be "adopted" by someone else, but it is far better than building our house on an unsure foundation.

If we ignore all these discrepancies (silent dogs), this will carry a whole cacophony of sounds, causing others to doubt our scholarship in other areas.

At least that's the way I see it. Judy