I knew or at least suspected that much of the information regarding the Pickering's of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts was to be found in books published in the 19th century and long out of print. Also, I know (or at least suspected) that other genealogists in are actively researching the same lines as I am. So, for the first time I have made use of a couple of research techniques that I have not used before. I started out by collecting information from personal trees posted to Ancestry.com's OneWorld section. I am aware that it is important to keep in mind that a lot of the information found in OneWorld is, for the most part, un-sourced and rarely not scrutinized for errors, but at least I was able to get clues and leads. From this "harvesting" – as I like to call it – I was able to put together a "framework" based on what Ancestry.com's automated processes had pieced together from other people's GEDCOM uploads.

First I reviewed the "framework" for obvious mistakes, for example, one showing a child with both parents named "Henry Eaton" or other, not so obvious, mistakes such as the one that I found where John Pickering of Salem is shown as the son of Sir Gilbert Pickering (he was not).

After noting the mistakes that I had found I then paid a visit to the on-line forums that focused on these surnames and families I had listed. Here I reviewed messages from others that discussed any issues that I had found so far. From this I was able to learn about any issues regarding the families and pedigrees that I was not yet aware of.

With this knowledge at hand, I then paid a visit to Google's Book Search (http://books.google.com/). Book Search is a tool from Google that searches the full text of books that Google scans and stores in its digital database. Working with several high-profile university and public libraries, including the University of Michigan, Harvard (Widener Library), Stanford (Green Library), Oxford (Bodleian Library), and the New York Public Library, Google has made available for full-view, on-line some 10,000 works in the public domain. Searching Google's Book Search for topics that included the surnames of interest and locales in which those names were found, I found a number of titles, all dating from the mid-to-late 19th century, that provided me with a enough information to put together a not-so-fuzzy picture of the lines which I was focusing on.

The lines that I am focusing on are those of Hannah Bancroft, daughter of John Bancroft & Elizabeth Eaton and grand-daughter of Elizabeth Kendall. I was intrigued by these lines because in my review of the "harvesting" from Ancestry.com I noted that other researchers, operating at least as a consensus, had traced the Kendall branch back to the 15th century and the Eaton branch back to century following the Norman invasion of England and in some cases back further to the years before William the Conqueror.

The Eaton branch from Hannah Bancroft to at least the first American immigrant of that line is documented in several places as follows: Elizabeth Eaton à John Eaton à William Eaton

The Genealogical and Family History of the State of Maine By Henry Sweetser Burrage has this to say in regards to William Eaton:

"William, came to Reading, Massachusetts, from Staple, England, sailing from Sandwich before June 9, 1637; settled first at Water-town, where he was a proprietor as early as 1642; removed to the adjacent town of Reading, where he was a proprietor in 1644 and a town officer later; he, his wife and children were legatees in the will of his wife's sister, Margaret Lane, of London, England, dated September 3, 1662; he died at Reading, May 13 1673."