 In 1902 , Edson S. Jones , a descendant of Thomas Arnold of Watertown and Providence mentioned earlier , visited England in search of records pertaining to his family . Thinking that Thomas Arnold was connected with William Arnold ( which , it turned out , he was not ) , he visited Northover and Ilchester , finding the original parish registers , as well as other important source documents . He discovered that every entry in the Arnold record that could be compared with entries in the parish registers matched perfectly . He also discovered that the Somerby pedigree of the Arnold family had serious discrepancies with original documents . As he checked the source documents from which Somerby supposedly compiled the pedigree , he found that some of the generations in the Somerby pedigree had been shuffled from the original documents , some members of the lineage came from unrelated families , and some place names seemed to have been totally made up . It had earlier been believed that a Thomas Arnold was the father of William Arnold , and Somerby stated that this Thomas Arnold came from a place called Northover near <unk> in County Dorset . No such place exists . The Somerby pedigree of the Arnold family published in 1879 was riddled with misinformation , and it had been accepted as fact for over three decades by even prominent genealogists such as John O. Austin . Fred Arnold wrote in 1921 , " The most regrettable feature in Somerby 's work is , that in the absence of any English record , known here to disprove it , so reliable a genealogist as Mr. John O. Austin was led to accept and use it in his dictionary , although neither give any record evidence . Very rarely has Mr. Austin accepted another 's statement , unless he has himself seen evidence to support it . " This fabricated research was not an isolated incident ; Mr. Somerby had also been implicated in other fraudulent research and was out to please his clients regardless of the veracity of his work . 
