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Awesome, thank you Rolnora. I'll need to use Family Search more often. There's a marriage record for George Fritche and Elizabeth Mills in All Saints Derby in 1765, I guess George Christopher's parents. George Sr. is called "Trumpet of the Blues." I'm guessing that's a military thing. I wonder if he was from Derby then or moved there with the army.

http://ukga.org/cgi-bin/search.cgi?action=ViewRec&DB=8&recid=102765

Thank you so much Dawnsh I'd really appreciate that.

Thanks for the help guys. I called the Allen County library and unfortunately they said they don't do interlibrary loans. They told me to check out, I think they said the OCLC or something, for more help. These websites that were suggested in the thread, could I read the articles there? Sorry, I just have a hard time figuring these sites out and I don't want to sign up for something and it just directs me to more places I might find the articles. I could try out the free trial though and see.

Yes, sometimes it does get frustrating, especially with common names like John, Jonathan, George, etc., and a family like the Fairbanks' of whom there were a lot in the surrounding parishes.

There are two articles I've been looking for online, though with no luck, to compare and contrast the arguments, one from 2012 trying to assert that Jonathan was the half-brother of George of Sowerby, the article is called "Jonathan Fairbank of Dedham, Massachusetts, and his family in the West Riding of Yorkshire," published in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register, and another older article, written in 1961 by Clarence Almon Torrey titled "The English Ancestry of Jonathan Fairbanks of Dedham, Massachusetts" that says Jonathan's father was a George Fairbanks of the village of Heptonstall a few miles away, and that since Heptonstall's parish registers are missing from something like 1590-1600, that's why his baptism doesn't appear.

Hi everyone, I've been looking everywhere for where I can find articles from The American Genealogist and also from The New England Historical and Genealogical Register.

There are two articles from those respective magazines I would like to find, about the debate over the parents of Jonathan Fairbanks of Dedham Massachusetts. There is a 1961 article in The American Genealogist, volume 37, by Clarence Almon Torrey titled "The English Ancestry of Jonathan Fairbanks of Dedham, Massachusetts" that asserts Jonathan's parents were George Fairbanks and Mary Farrar of the village of Heptonstall, Yorkshire.

Then there's an article by Joseph and Ruth Fairbanks and and James Swan Landberg in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register, volume 116 from 2012, titled "Jonathan Fairbank of Dedham, Massachusetts, and his family in the West Riding of Yorkshire."

The gist of the 2012 article is that a clothier named George Fairbanks of the village of Sowerby a few miles from Heptonstall, a copy of whose will was sent to "his loving cousin Jonathan Fairbanks in New England" was actually the elder half brother of Jonathan of Dedham, and that he was described as a cousin because the two weren't very close. That doesn't make much sense to me since in his will this George (who had no wife or children) calls his siblings siblings and his cousins cousins, and also the writing on the back of the copy of the will that addresses "his loving cousin Jonathan" is different from the handwriting used in the will itself, implying George isn't the one who wrote it, so I don't know why the scribe would bother referring to the allegedly estranged half brother as a cousin rather than acknowledge him as a sibling.

Anyway, I'd like a chance to read these two articles and see what the competing evidence is, but I can't find the publications anywhere online.