Ladies and gentlemen,

I am not a proponent of outing someone on the internet by name, but a certain individual has made quite a mess of things with their research and I wish to make it known just how terrible their publications to the internet have been.

Before I begin, I will admit that yes, I myself have posted incorrect information to the interwebs and have even caused a stir or two among some online communities with my early genealogical work. That said, I have, when proven wrong, conceded and worked towards revising my postings and sending corrected e-mails to the researchers who were involved in the subject at hand. (I do these compilations all on my own, and ask questions that many have not, so they will have errors inevitably.)

I can not say that Gary Ray Smith has made such an effort. In fact, Gary has gone to great lengths to make sure that the internet is aware his relationship to Maj. Lawrence Smith and Sir Thomas “Customer” Smythe, as well as others. Allow me to explain.

Starting back on August 2, 2008, Gary posted the following to a Genealogy.com message board. He claimed to be able to link a Martin Alexander Smith (Gary’s Smith ancestor) to Major Lawrence Smith. A keen researcher will immediately doubt the accuracy of this work, but others will more than happily accept it at face value.

To further mess things up, Group R-M269-8 on SmithsWorldWide.org has chosen to USE the same tree Gary has in his posting as the basis for their tree back to Maj Lawrence Smith’s father! Aghh! They now have a yDNA line linked to Maj. Lawrence Smith and it’s not even correct! I find it interesting that this research matches that of Linda G. Cheeks. I would suspect that Gary found Linda’s research and adopted it as his own, or something like that.

More on Martin Alexander Smith in a moment. He’s the main reason I’m upset with Gary’s online activity.

According to Gary, this is how he believes, due to his “relatedness” to Maj. Lawrence Smith, his own coat of arms, today, in The US of A, should look.

I will do my best to explain what he has done. First, he has combined the primary design elements of the coat of arms of Sir Thomas “Customer” Smythe with those of Maj. Lawrence Smith, those being the three lions from Customer’s arms and the acorns and chevron of Lawrence’s. He has then replaced the ounce (snow leopard) of Customer’s crest with a lion passant, arbitrarily. Please remember that none of these Smith lines are related, even distantly.

Ok, so if someone’s doing something like this in their own time in the privacy of your own home, I have no problem with it. It definitely is a history lesson in the right light and a creative work of art. However, when someone takes this concoction of a coat of arms and pastes it all over the internet and falsely claims they’re related to Maj.Lawrence Smith,then yeah, that’s a problem for the online genealogical community. He had this fake coat of arms (a variant of one of the pictures on the previously linked page) uploaded to FindAGrave.com and it was the primary photo for Maj. Lawrence Smith for quite a while, a year at a minimum. It appears to have been removed, finally, at the time of this writing. Nope! I was wrong. Xpofer Smyth (who was NOT a Lt. Christopher Smith) still has Gary’s fake coat of arms attached to it along with a completely unrelated coa as well. Agh!!

The other thing that really burns me is that Gary went on to claim that he is related to William the Conqueror by way of his Smith line. Now this is an extraordinary claim and one that many online will make without too much proof. (I have read that there is a saying in England that “All Smiths are Carringtons”).

The issue with this is that Gary went on to make a Yahoo! Group called “The Sir Thomas Smythe Clan”, a group that was created around the idea of Gary’s Smith line being related to Customer Smythe and therefore (sigh) John Carrington, Esq. of Rivenhall, and further, William (Guillaume) the Conqueror. As my research has shown, and as some before me have concluded, Customer Smythe was not related to John Carrington, Esq., nor was Maj. Lawrence Smith related to Customer Smythe! This group included folks from all around the planet who were interested in genealogy and early English history, some even writing persuasive essays on the benefits of a benevolent monarchy. (Customer Smythe was involved in The East India Trading Company and his son was involved in The Virginia Company. Also, Queen Elizabeth II is supposed to be descended from Maj. Lawrence Smith’s brother, Col. John Smith of Purton (or Shooter’s Hill?) who married Mary Warner of Warner Hall.)

At a very minimum, he should have stated that his work was a work in progress and containing conjecture, but he decided to make this posting and matter-of-fact-ly state that he was of Lawrence Smith’s line. This lineage Gary has concocted is EVERYWHERE and I’ve seen Gary’s posting used as a source in a number of trees. Tens of thousands of trees on Ancestry.com and elsewhere all reflect this bogus line! Linda G. Cheek is also to blame for this prolific false truth.

Additionally, I have found that Gary is involved in a few websites that discuss The Klu Klux Klan. Be it pity, compassion, or sympathy, I do understand that we can not choose who we are birthed from in this world. That said, Gary made a choice to link his Martin Alexander Smith, a member of The Knights of the Golden Circle [video about National Treasure 2], to Maj. Lawrence Smith’s line, Customer Smythe’s line, and the agnatic line of William the Conqueror. I know these connections are not true and were created by Gary to inflate his online presence, a means for what ends I am unsure.

Let me be clear, an ancestor of Gary Ray Smith, a one Martin Alexander Smith, who was a conspirator with John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of President Abraham Lincoln, was not an agnate of (related on the male line to): Maj. Lawrence Smith, Sir Thomas “Customer” Smythe, John Carrington, Esq. of Rivenhall, or William the Conqueror. I feel this is what I mostly want to say in a nutshell.

Thanks for reading,

Chris Smith

Note: As of the writing of this document, it appears that Google’s search results are mostly purged of Gary’s websites. He is still active online, but not in a genealogical research capacity. Only a few web postings of his still show up if you search for any of the above Smith lines I’ve mentioned.