Modern Myths of the Weems Family History: Separating Fact from Fiction

"I made up the list from my own imagination." - Diana Muir, then known as Diana Hanson, speaking to the FBI in 1983.

Anyone who has spent a significant amount of time doing genealogical research will probably be aware of the persistent myths which tend to surround many American family histories - Cherokee princesses, undocumented Mayflower passengers, and other vague recollections supposedly passed down through the generations. If you could travel back in time, perhaps you might find small grains of truth here and there, but largely these stories turn out to be unprovable and are generally regarded as extremely unlikely by any serious genealogist or reputable historian.

Occasionally, you will come across more fantastical tales of buried treasure and descent from royalty, or even Biblical patriarchs. It isn't uncommon to see hastily thrown together trees on genealogy websites showing relationships which are mathematically or geographically impossible. Because of this, taking genealogy seriously usually involves the untangling of a complicated web made up of half-truths and modern mythology. Of course, this isn't unique to genealogy. When learning about any historical subject matter, you'll find a slew of information ranging from ignorant misconceptions and rumors, overly simplified or embellished pop culture, all the way up to serious academic research based on careful examination of the evidence.

Ultimately, the nuances and small details always play a crucial role in revealing the full truth, yet far too often get overlooked in favor of a nice story. That's just human nature, and it certainly describes the experience of researching a certain branch of my family tree. Every step of the journey has revealed an increasingly complicated mess of tall tales and unverified claims. The following story is the end result of several years spent tracking a long series of dead ends, trying to somehow make sense of the nonsensical. When the pieces finally started coming together, I was very surprised at what I found. Hopefully, like-minded researchers attempting to verify these claims will find this information helpful, and a more accurate account of the lives of our ancestors can eventually be passed on.

Diana J. Muir is known as a professional genealogist and online educator, with a significant internet presence and a long list of self-published family history books. According to her online profiles and biographies, she holds several advanced degrees and has spent a decades-long career researching, teaching, and traveling all over the US and beyond, conducting extensive family history research. I first became aware of her work several years ago while looking into my paternal grandmother's ancestors, the Weems family of Abbeville, South Carolina. Diana's name would come up occasionally in online discussions, and I noticed she had written a book on the Abbeville Weems descendants available to purchase on Amazon and other sites.

At some point, I found a large portion of this Abbeville Weems book available as a free preview in digital format, and decided to take a look. There was an overwhelming amount of information spanning hundreds of pages. As I glanced through it, I realized nearly the entire book was an automatically generated family tree report, documenting generation after generation of individuals with the Weems surname. Roughly half of the pages were copies of previous pages, sometimes repeated ten or twenty times. Large portions were not actually verified or backed up with legitimate sources, and right away I started spotting major inaccuracies. It was all very similar, if not identical, to the numerous dodgy family trees floating around on Ancestry.com and elsewhere, just sloppily compiled into book form.

To her credit, Diana included a note at the beginning of the book acknowledging it was incomplete and contained errors. Fair enough - she wasn't claiming to have conducted some kind of groundbreaking research or miraculously solved every unanswered question. She was just sharing what she had collected over the years for others to use, which was perfectly fine. I hoped to at least find something useful in her book in the future, even if it wasn't immediately relevant to my interests.

As I continued my own research, I noticed more of Diana's books gradually filling up my search results. There were a few different titles:

"The Weems of Abbeville, South Carolina"
"Descendants of Thomas Weems and Elizabeth Redfearn"
"Ancestors of John and Kitty Weems of Greene Co., TN"
"The Descendants of John Weems and Catherine Dengler of Greene Co., TN."
"Descendants of George Wright Weems and Nancy Carter"
"Descendants of Elizabeth Weems and Thomas Bailey of Greene Co., TN"

Diana was continuously releasing updated versions, sometimes narrowing the books down to focus on more specific family branches. However, they still didn't appear to contain any significant research which couldn't be easily gathered from the usual internet sources. There were errors everywhere, speculation presented as fact, and unfortunately very little care was put into the details. There seemed to be a noticeable pattern of extremely low standards applied to all of Diana's research, which was surprising for someone with so much experience. Compared to books published by many other professional genealogists, I found Diana's to be largely unfit for sharing with the public.

This brings me to my first specific problem with Diana's research. Her books focus on two families I am very familiar with - Thomas Weems of Abbeville, SC and John Weems of Greene County, TN. These two settlers seem to be the ancestors of many Weems families in the Southern United States. For years, there has been speculation about whether they were related, and who their parents might have been, but there has never been strong enough evidence to reach any definitive conclusions.

While the early Weems family history remains largely undocumented, it is extremely clear that there were actually two different men named Thomas Weems living in different parts of South Carolina during the late 1700s. There was a Thomas Weems who resided in Abbeville District, and there was a Thomas Scott Weems who resided in Cheraw District. It is easy to confuse the two, or confuse the younger Captain Thomas Weems of Abbeville (likely son of the first Thomas Weems who settled there) with the Cheraw, SC / Franklin, GA Weems family, since they were close in age. However, as I outlined in my first blog post, these are clearly two separate families. There are many inaccurate family trees floating around the internet which have mistakenly combined these two or three men, including the trees published in several of Diana's books.

For a full breakdown of all the known records on Thomas Weems and Thomas Scott Weems, as well as John Weems, see my previous blog post "Forefathers of the Southern Weems Families":

https://searchingforheritage.blogspot.com/2023/03/forefathers-of-southern-weems-families.html

These issues have been discussed and debated among a handful of Weems researchers for a while now. As early as 2008, you can find posts on the Genealogy.com Weems forum breaking down the differences between the two Thomas Weems families in an attempt to clear up the confusion:

https://www.genealogy.com/forum/surnames/topics/weems/943/

About three years ago, I joined a Weems Genealogy Facebook group, hoping to share my notes and collaborate with distant relatives. I noticed Diana herself was active in this group, and the issue of erroneously combining the two Thomas Weems families had been brought to her attention. Over the course of 2017 and 2018, there were several exchanges between Diana and other group members repeatedly trying to clear up the distinction between the two families, to no avail. Diana would sometimes acknowledge that Thomas of Abbeville and Thomas Scott of Cheraw were two seperate people, but then revert back to her previous claims and continue to publish books combining them and their descendants.

Eventually, after one particularly frustrating exchange in March 2020, Diana chose to leave the group instead of accepting the evidence which clearly contradicted her research.

During these exchanges, I noticed Diana referenced some journals belonging to John Weems of Greene County, TN as one of her primary sources for the specific relationships between these colonial-era Weems settlers. I was a bit puzzled by the mention of these journals, because after about 15 years of closely following every mention of Weems genealogy on every corner of the internet, I had never heard of them.

I double-checked for any reference to these Weems journals on the usual genealogy sites, but didn't find anything. I asked a descendant of the Greene County Weems who I had been in contact with years ago, and they had never heard of any such journals. As far as I could tell, Diana was the only person who ever mentioned them anywhere on the internet. I quickly forgot about this irregularity for a while, but it stuck in the back of my mind to follow up again in the future.

In the meantime, I found numerous write-ups and posts from Diana making all sorts of equally confusing claims about the Weems genealogy. Several contradictory statements had been shared as facts over the years, but upon closer investigation hadn't been confirmed by any historical records. While I fully acknowledge that discovering new evidence can often change the understanding of any given subject, it's no excuse for jumping to conclusions so frequently. Diana rarely makes it clear that her research is largely speculative, instead choosing to stretch vague bits and pieces into theoretical family trees which she presents as solid proof.

Here is just one such example - Diana's claim that the maiden name of Kitty (Catherine), wife of John Weems (of Orange, NC and Greene, TN) was Dengler or Dingler.

Back in 2009, Diana claimed that Kitty's maiden name was Goodwin. I'm not sure where this name originally came from, but it was shared as a fact in the following post still available on Ancestry.com, originally posted on a now defunct website belonging to Diana:

Two years later, in 2011, a researcher named Linda Gaunt made the following post about a potential Weems/Dengler connection on the Genealogy.com Weems Forum:

https://www.genealogy.com/forum/surnames/topics/weems/1084/

As you can see, Linda makes it clear that this information is highly speculative, stating "I don't know the source of this info, but it looks possible."

Just a few months later in 2012, Diana made the following post about the Dingler connection:

https://www.ancestry.com/boards/surnames.weems/477

At this point, it appeared Diana was treating the Dingler connection as a hypothesis or loose theory, and was in the process of gathering evidence to support it. However, she made the common mistake of mixing up Thomas Scott Weems of Cheraw with Thomas Weems from Abbeville, and took a giant leap in asserting that either of them could be proven to be the son of John Weems and Ann McIlvain of Bucks County, PA. This is impossible for a few reasons - Ann McIlvain and her husband Thomas Weems (not John) were both born in the 1730s, and their children are relatively well documented in probate records. There is no connection to the Carolinas or Tennessee, and the math simply doesn't work.

Nearly two years later, in 2013, Diana replied to Linda's 2011 post, appearing to confirm the relationship as a fact, citing "you have to meet someone to marry them". No mention whatsoever that the relationship was just a loose theory and still needed to be confirmed with actual evidence. She also claimed that John Weems was in fact the brother of Thomas Weems of Abbeville, but didn't share how she was able to verify any of this.

https://www.genealogy.com/forum/surnames/topics/weems/1104/

Like a backwards, multi-year game of telephone, somehow this tiny, unsubstantiated piece of information with no real credibility went from a lone internet forum post to being published in several books and shared as fact. If you look up the wife of John Weems on any major genealogy site, most users' family trees now show "Catherine Dingler" or some variation. I can't emphasize enough just how irresponsible it is for someone who calls themself a professional genealogist with a lifetime of experience to be making such declarative statements, based on almost nothing. Of course, it's not impossible that Catherine's maiden name was Dengler/Dingler, but it isn't supported by a single piece of real evidence.

To be clear, I have spent countless hours trying to find any evidence for a Dengler/Dingler connection to John or Kitty Weems, and I've come up empty-handed. No marriage bond or certificate, no neighboring properties, no mention in wills or probate records, no other known records. There doesn't appear to be any hint whatsoever of a possible connection between these two family names before Linda Gaunt's post in 2011. Unfortunately, this information has now been spread far and wide.

Another few years went by as I gradually continued my Weems research in my free time, making very little progress. Since there was so much conflicting information surrounding these early Weems ancestors, it eventually became clear that to avoid any confusion, I should only rely on primary sources, and disregard virtually everything else. If a family tree or relationship can't be verified by an actual historical document or record I can see with my own eyes (digitally at least), then it can usually be ignored. But no matter how hard I tried to avoid it, I kept stumbling across Diana's unreliable research, and eventually circled back to those Weems Facebook discussions where Diana mentioned the discovery of journals belonging to John Weems of Greene County, Tennessee.

When I first started researching the Abbeville Weems family, I knew I wasn't the only one having serious difficulties. I exchanged emails with a few distant cousins for years trying to break through our numerous brick walls. You can find old posts on defunct genealogy forums where others were having similar issues trying to make sense of these same family lines back in the 1990s. Suddenly, with Diana's recent discovery of the Weems journals, there appeared to be a huge breakthrough, allowing her to trace these families back much further than anyone ever had before.

At this point, I found it incredibly unusual that a professional genealogist with such a high level of education seemed to have this unfounded confidence in some mysterious sources of crucial information which no one else had access to. I kept hoping Diana was preparing to release the journals in their entirety, but that never happened. Instead, she appeared to be gradually publishing sections of them over the course of several years. Why was she the only researcher making any reference to them? Her claims didn't make any logical sense, and I decided I had to learn more about the situation.

With just a few minutes of searching, I found that the story went much deeper and stranger than I ever expected. These Weems journals appeared to be connected to a 14th century Scottish-Norwegian nobleman named Henry Sinclair, Earl of Orkney. I realized that Diana Muir had recently published a book on Henry Sinclair's journals, which it turns out were the oldest part of a collection of journals passed down to her ancestor John Weems in Tennessee. Diana claims she discovered these journals herself in Greene County in 2005 where they had been stored away virtually unnoticed for over 120 years.

Henry Sinclair, although a real historical figure, has been connected to a variety of "alternative history" theories involving secret societies, the Knights Templar, Freemasons, the hidden treasure on Oak Island, the Kensington Runestone, and the alleged discovery and settlement of America ~100 years before Christopher Columbus. You may have come across shows on the History Channel detailing these theories, along with a niche genre of books, documentaries, and online treasure hunter communities who closely follow all of this lore.

Although completely unverified, there is a widely held belief in these circles that Henry Sinclair traveled across the North Atlantic to America with the Zeno brothers, two Italian sailors who later wrote about their alleged voyages and created a map. As part of this theory, European explorers supposedly established American settlements and traveled as far west as Minnesota. With the discovery of these journals, Diana Muir is claiming that Henry Sinclair wrote about his voyages to North America and passed his writings down to his descendants, who eventually included John Weems of Greene County, Tennessee. Diana claims that in addition to Sinclair's original journals, many generations after him continued to add their own journals to this collection, up until the early 1800s, ending with John Weems.

It turns out Diana Muir is a friend and collaborator of History Channel television personality Scott Wolter, who is a forensic geologist from Minnesota. Scott believes there is evidence to support these theories of pre-Columbian European exploration of inland North America. He wrote the forward for Diana's Henry Sinclair book, and embraces her research as an extremely important part of this history. But there seems to be some uncertainty lurking beneath the surface, with nothing ever quite approaching 100% confirmable. While Diana doesn't shy away from making bold claims, Scott tends to be more reserved with his language and leaves room for doubt.

So how did Diana come across these journals, and what exactly do they contain? She tells the story herself in her book "The Lost Templar Journals of Prince Henry Sinclair Book 1 - 1353-1395":

https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Lost_Templar_Journals_of_Prince_Henr/oAp-DwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1

(Note: There are actually two different versions of this book. I will be referencing the version with numbered pages, sources cited, and forwards, since it is easier to follow. This version was published on July 16, 2019 according to Google, and is accessible at the above address.)

To summarize pages 31 - 36:

Diana states that she traveled to Greene County, Tennessee in May 2005, to visit the graves of her Weems ancestors in the town of Baileyton. She gives a brief outline of the life of John Weems (1741 - 1812) and his wife Catherine Dengler, describing in suspiciously vague terms once again how she was able to determine Catherine's maiden name and where exactly John came from before settling in NC and TN. Diana states that Catherine Magdalena Dengler came from Bucks County, PA, the same place as the family of John Weems. Just as in her forum posts, Diana provides no direct evidence for this relationship, or evidence for John Weems coming from Bucks County at all. She simply says another researcher received "a letter from someone". She cites the book "The History of Bucks County Pennsylvania", which does contain some references to the last name Dengler, but no specific mention of any of these individuals.

As I mentioned before, after extensive searching I have been unable to locate a single document showing any marriage or other relationship between a Weems and a Dengler/Dingler during this time period. Not in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, or Tennessee. It appears there were definitely some Denglers in the state of Pennsylvania around this time, perhaps even a Catherine Dengler in Bucks County, but there is no evidence of Denglers living within a reasonably close proximity of any known Weems families, or any marriages between them.

Diana confidently asserts that a John Weems who owned property in Chester County, PA is the same John Weems who lived in Bucks County, PA and later moved to Orange, NC and Greene, TN. No such connection has ever been established. Given the popularity of the name John, and the existence of multiple known groups of Weems families at this time, it would be unfounded to assume that these are all the same individual.

A claim is made that John Weems' father has been identified, after tracking (forward and back) every Weems from the 1850 US census. Supposedly, only a few people couldn't be connected to each other and "John Wemyss of Abington, PA born in 1709 was one of them".

Examining this claim more closely, there are clearly numerous examples of Weems households appearing in census records between 1790 and 1850 all over the US who cannot be directly linked to any specific lineage. Although many who appeared in Georgia, Alabama, and other southern states are likely descended from either Thomas Weems of Abbeville, SC or Thomas Scott Weems of Cheraw, SC,  it has not been proven conclusively which family they are connected to. Others who appeared in Maryland, Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky also don't have a provable connection to any known Weems lineage. It's entirely plausible, if not likely, that more individuals with the last name Wemyss / Weems continued to immigrate into the United States from the British Isles in the decades after the American Revolution.

So how can anyone claim that almost every Weems in the US census has been connected? How can anyone use the minimal information available in the 1790 to 1850 census records to make a definitive claim about a man who was born all the way back in 1709? Logically, this doesn't make a lot of sense. Perhaps these records could provide some hints based on the locations of certain groups, but this John Weems' descendants could have easily died or moved far away by 1790. This is being glossed over, and there are no sources cited for this extremely crucial connection. Once again, no source is cited for John Weems being married to a Dengler or this John having any documented association with an older John Weems. Diana seems to rely very heavily on a variation of one of her favorite catch phrases, "After all, you can't marry someone if you don't meet them."

All that can be concluded based on the available evidence is that John Weems first appeared in Orange County, NC in the mid-1760s before moving with his family to Greene County, TN around 1791. It cannot be proven with any available evidence that this same John Weems had a direct connection to any family in Pennsylvania. But let's disregard that for now, and move on to the real subject of Diana's book - the Weems journals themselves.

On pages 49 -  65, Diana goes on to describe an old trunk being pulled out of the basement of the Old Brick Church in Greene County, TN when it burned down around 1876 or 1880. This trunk was said to contain a saddle bag with the personal papers of John Weems, who died in 1812. During her trip in 2005, this saddle bag was allegedly given to Diana by an unnamed person.

Diana doesn't mention exactly where this trunk was located between 1880 and 2005, when she took possession of the saddle bag. These crucial details would of course help verify her story, but she doesn't name any specific person(s) or building(s), or make any attempt to trace the historical ownership of the journals. She does mention visiting distant family members, a local historical society, library, and museum, but provides no further description of "the person who had custody of them". Diana claims she held onto this saddle bag for several years before realizing it contained 20 journals in Latin, Old English, and modern English, passed down through the generations from the 14th century to John Weems.

Diana details her attempts to meet with several experts to help verify her assessment of the journals, ultimately teaming up with Scott Wolter. Then at some point in 2016 or 2017, on her way to give the journals to Scott, she became "terrified" of being called a fraud, so she threw away the bag and all of its contents into a dumpster. According to her, only a few of the original pages remain in her possession, along with "samples of the saddle bag" and "clothe (sic) that the map had been wrapped in".

Luckily, Diana had already transcribed all 20 books, and had digitized copies of "about 30 pages". From this, she was supposedly able to work with Scott Wolter to vet the information in the journals. At this point, Diana insists that her transcriptions are the most substantial evidence of the journals being authentic. She implies that her and Scott's historical analysis of the text shows definitively that the writings could not have been faked. This crucial element of her story never becomes fully fleshed out, and ultimately doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

Diana actually states "there are events, people, astronomical events and traditions that I and others wouldn't have known unless we'd been standing there in the same place, at the same time." How can the events/people be verified as accurate if they were impossible for Diana to know before finding the journals? This argument is paradoxical, because any sources containing the information which verifies the journals' contents were undoubtedly just as freely accessible to anyone who might have written the journals as a forgery in recent years. It appears Diana is attempting to use her own ignorance as evidence that the journals are authentic, which of course doesn't rule out the possibility that a forger could have done a thorough amount of research on the subject matter while writing.

Diana eventually clarifies that the journals she found were likely copies made by hand around the time of the American Civil War, by either John Granser Weems (1803 - 1876) or his cousin George Bailey (1846 - 1912), descendants of the original John Weems who settled in Greene County. Initially, Diana had believed the journals to be originals, but probably realized how unlikely it would be for the oldest journals to survive intact for so long. However, Diana does insist that the lambskin map must have been much older, not a more recent copy.

Diana acknowledges that most people will think the whole story is a hoax. Despite having a PhD, she also acknowledges that a "true academic" would have presented the documents with both the original and translation, side by side. She claims she isn't familiar with Old English or Middle English and did her best with the help of Google Translate. She also clarifies that "no hard scientific testing of the journal pages has been done yet." Apparently, despite spending countless hours transcribing and translating, Diana didn't think it would be worthwhile to make more than a very amateur-level attempt at analyzing the journals.

On pages 31 and 58, Diana refers to John Weems (1741 - 1812) as her "3rd great-grandfather", which immediately stood out to me as mathematically very improbable. John and Kitty's children were born between 1765 and 1784, and their grandchildren between roughly 1783 and 1825. Going down another generation through John and Kitty's daughter Elizabeth Weems Bailey (Diana's branch), her grandchildren (John and Kitty's great-grandchildren) were born from about 1810 through the 1830s. This means the 3x great-grandchildren on this branch would have been born in the mid to late 1800s, with the youngest possibly being born in the early 1900s. As far as I can tell, there are no 3x great-grandchildren of John and Kitty Weems still living.

Diana's multiple family trees on Ancestry.com show that John Weems (1741 - 1812) and Kitty were actually her 6th great-grandparents, on her biological father's maternal side. For some reason, Diana has shortened her own lineage by three generations in her book. I can't find any explanation for this discrepancy. This is an especially glaring oversight, considering how relatively easy it is to do the math.

I'm not sure it's necessary for me to continue dissecting every detail of Diana's story, but let's just say the more I learned, the more my doubts about its accuracy continued to grow. Doesn't it seem far-fetched? Either Diana is one of the luckiest genealogical researchers in the world, or... something very fishy is going on here. But hey, stranger things have happened, so let's not jump to any conclusions right away.

Hoping to learn more, I found an interview with Diana on a podcast called Forum Borealis from March 27, 2021.

I have transcribed the relevant parts, but the entire two episodes can be found here:

YouTube - Part 1 of 2

YouTube - Part 2 of 2

Apple Podcasts - Part 1 of 2

Apple Podcasts - Part 2 of 2

Show Transcript

Hosted by Al Borealis
Guest Diana Muir

16:06

Al Borealis: You're not just a translator. As I understand it, you are involved in the origins of this. So could we start there? How did you become aware of these incredible pieces of documents?

Diana Muir: Well, I've been doing genealogy - my own genealogy - for many, many years and I was in Greene County, Tennessee working on my family, which was the Weems family. And it turned out after 20 years of doing the Weems, I finally realized that they were related to the Sinclairs.

I actually went to Greene County one weekend - I think it was Mother's Day in 2005, and while I was at the library I asked the gentleman there, I said do you have anything else for the name Weems? He said "well, there's a trunk downstairs that was pulled out of a burning church, which has a bag in it, that says "property of John Weems"

He said we have never even indexed it because it smells so bad. But he said if you want to take it and look through it, just let us know if you find anything important. So he took me downstairs and we pulled out this old leather saddle bag. It's not a saddle bag like you would think - it's long and round. And when we opened it, it was full of journals - old books, and a map.

17:39

AB: And they were like, hand written, right? Not printed?

DM: They were all hand written and the ones on the top were in Latin, and I couldn't read it. I only recognized one name, which was Henricus Sinclair, and I just figured, well I'll figure it out later. So, I took them home with me and being busy like I was with the online school, I put them in the back of the closet, and five years later when I came home to Illinois I packed them in the car and brought them with me.

18:11

AB: Hang on, at this point, you were first in the library. Did you take everything that was in the bag?

DM: I took the entire bag. It had never been indexed, they didn't know what was in it. They had no idea. They weren't about to do that. It had actually been there since 1880.

18:28

AB: Wow, and did they know you already? Like, were you a customer?

DM: No, but I had been there several times, and so they knew that I was a professional and that I was working on the family. I had actually been up to the Weems cemetery before the library opened that day, and found out that the church that it had been taken out of had burned down in 1882, I think. And the man who was the minister at the time was John Granser Weems, who was like a great-grandson of John Weems who died in 1812, and these had belonged to him. He was actually the last author that wrote in them.

19:08

AB: Ah! Okay - Hang on, hang on, I'll have to write this down. So John Weems was his name? The last one?

DM: John Weems, W-E-E-M-S, and he died in 1812.

AB: 1812, and I guess - when is the last entry? I know we are not there yet, because...

DM: 1812

19:28

AB: 1812, okay, nice. And then they were resting in that church up until 1882 when it burned down?

DM: Yes, and his great grandson apparently knew that they were important and so he ran in and he grabbed them, and he took them out of the building before it completely collapsed. And ever since then, it had sat in the basement of this old home that used to belong to someone by the name of Cox, who were also related.

But because the bag smelled so bad - like burning tar - nobody wanted anything to do with it. They really didn't know what was in it, and they didn't seem to care. So, when they found the trunk in the basement of the historical society ,they just left it there. And when I asked for it, they said "Sure, take it."

20:14

AB: Okay, so they let you have the entire thing without - did they ask you to index it for them, or what was the story there?

DM: Well, they told me, they said if you find anything of value or of interest, please let us know. And so, since then, I have sent them the completed genealogy of John Weems so that they can share it with the rest of the people that come in, and I've started to publish them. But they were in my closet up until 2014.

20:45

AB: Okay, what did they do in the closet?

DM: They just sat there. For nine years, I didn't take the time to look into them. And even then, when I started translating them, I didn't know what they were. And I was more interested in finding out who John Weems' father was, and I was more interested in my own genealogy. So I didn't take an academic approach to them. I didn't make copies, I didn't translate it on one side of the page and have the original on the other. I just translated it for my own self and my own research. And I started at the end, because that was in English and I could understand it.

21:30

AB: Right, but Scott mentioned that your translation was like putting them into modern lingo?

DM: Yes, it is, and as I started going through John Weems, who was the last author, he started talking about the journals and how they were in Latin, and he started talking about the entire story. And so then, I knew I needed to go back to the very beginning and start from scratch, otherwise I'd never understand it.

22:00

AB: Right, but I bet your curiosity was peaked when you recognized Henry Sinclair's name, or did you have no idea who he was maybe at this point?

DM: At that time, I had no idea who he was or how I was related. I was sitting around one night watching "The Curse of Oak Island" and this was in 2014, and the guys were talking about the Templars and Henry Sinclair. I go wait a minute, I know that name - Henry Sinclair. That is Henricus Santo Claro - and so I ran to the closet, and I pulled out this bag, and I dumped it all out, and I started looking at the older ones, and I could see that it was the journal of Henry Sinclair. But I still didn't know how he was related. So, I had to go back and work on the genealogy as well. And the Weems family in Tennessee had been descended from a man named David Weems who had come from Scotland, and his grandfather had married Catherine Sinclair.

23:00

AB: Yeah - I remember that entry actually, where -

DM: And as I started going back, I realized that Catherine Sinclair was -

AB: A hero to the story.

DM: She was, yeah. Scott thinks she's a hero to the story, because if she had not done what she had done, we would have lost the story forever.

23:20

AB: We'll get back to that. But let me ask you about - Scott mentioned something about - that although these are not most likely the original journals, even this version of them are gone now, or just fragments remain?

DM: Yes, just fragments remain. It's kind of - at the beginning, I didn't know what they were, and I started doing it just for my own research. And then as I found out what they were, it scared me, and people kept telling me "oh they've got to be fake, they've got to be an eighteenth century or nineteenth century forgery." And Scott had said something - "Well, it's either the greatest story of the world or it's the greatest forgery of the world." And I didn't want to be that person. I had gone to school out in Utah - back in 1973 I was at BYU, and there was a gentleman out there who was bringing forth all of these old Mormon documents, and it turned out he had forged them all.

AB: Wow.

DM: And he even killed two or three people in order to hide his forgery. And I didn't want to be identified as one of those people that did something like that, so I threw them away.

24:36

AB: But obviously you couldn't have known what treasures you actually did throw away?

DM: No, I didn't know. And it turns out that when Scott had the pages that were left tested for C-14, they were actually tested right around the Civil War. And that tells us that, first of all what I threw away was not the originals. So the question is - if those were copies, where are the originals? And the reason I think they were copied is because Greeneville, Tennessee was very active during the Civil War here in the United States. It changed hands five times between the Confederates and the Union.

25:19

AB: Oh, it was in the middle of the zone, huh?

DM: It was in the middle of the war, and it was right on the border, and there was a lot of activity. When the Confederates would come in, they would billet in the Masonic lodge. And they burned the lodge down twice, they burned down a local college, they burned down bridges, churches, everything. And all of the men who were descended from John Weems were also Masonic brethren. And I think what they did, was they copied it so that they would have a copy in case the originals got burned.

25:58

AB: Right, and if anyone would try to make it out of there - either going South to the generals there or to the North - certainly they would be catched and looked upon as spies, and the journals would have been taken.

DM: Right, and it turns out that John Weems had ten children. Four of his sons went West, and four of the others, four of the other sons and the daughters, stayed in Greeneville. So I believe that the part of the family that went West and South to Missouri may have the originals. So we're working on that now.

26:38

AB: It's out of the question that the originals could have been stored in one of the Masonic lodges in the libraries there? Yeah, because they weren't safe during the war. They were burned down as you say.

DM: Yeah, we don't know. We have no idea. We just know that Greeneville was a terrible place to be and they lost all the records of the Masonic hall except for the original lodge's certificate of being, and they only have that because somebody stole it from the Masonic lodge, took it down the street, and hid it under the floorboards of the local church.

27:14

AB: Right, but the fact that we even have something now is because you first translated the whole thing, and then when you saw the reactions, that's when you got fed up and threw them away?

DM: Well, yes and this happened almost right after I had met Scott and of course I didn't know him very well, and he didn't know me. I didn't know who to trust, or you know, what to trust, and I just didn't want to be that person. So...

AB: So you had pictures of them all, or...?

DM: We had taken pictures of some of them. Scott and I had met at the visitor's center down in Nauvoo, Illinois where I had them hidden at the time, and he took pictures of the middle part of the journals, and of the map. So we have some of those.

28:01

AB: So he saw them with his own eyes then?

DM: Oh yes, and he saw the map, and he's convinced the map was original, and that part of it at least, you know, was original. We know that the journals themselves that I threw away were most likely copies. And they had been copied by John Weems' sons who were all Freemasons. One was John Granser Weems who was a minister of that church, and the other one we think was John Junior Weems, and he went west to Missouri. He died in Illinois, but his son and his grandson and his brothers continued on to Stella, Missouri.

28:40

AB: Right. I didn't even know you had carbon dated what's left of them. That's such good news. And before people grab their pitchforks and their torches and gang up on you for throwing them away, you have compensated with sweating over the translations for hours upon hours.

DM: Yes, I kept the translation. I never got rid of the digital copies. We kept all of the original photos that we had taken.

29:10

AB: Let me say - it's not just the translations themselves, but it's that you have, and your team of people have, really made an effort to put context to every entry. And that's so useful because most people - I mean I thought I was well-versed, but if I didn't have that context, I would be lost for half of it. And the man in the street - he can actually get what's out of these books now. And he can get some sense out of it because of that hard work of explaining every detail - every year, every lineage, every group, every word, custom - the whole context, basically, so...

DM: And that's what I tried to do, was so that anyone who didn't know the story or didn't know anything about the background could learn it as they went. When I first did it, I didn't even know where Orkney was. I had to look it up.

...

31:20

AB: Okay, so but before we go more into him, just wrap up the diary part, because we will get heat for that.

DM: Okay.

AB: The map itself - you said Scott actually thinks that's not a copy but an original?

DM: I don't know how you could copy a sheep skin map.

AB: Right, good point.

DM: You'd have to go out and kill your own 800 year sheep, and skin it, and take off the hair, and...

31:45

AB: Yeah, but I mean, have you vetted - has that been carbon dated?

DM: Yes, I had a friend at the University of Iowa who was a researcher there. And the University of Iowa has a huge medical campus attached to it, and huge laboratory. So he was able to Carbon-14 the map, and some of the original pages before I destroyed them. And the map came back to 1400, give or minus, plus or minus, 50 years.

AB: Wow, 1400...

DM: And they were able to look at it and tell that it was a sheep skin. There was salt particles on the map, which you know - if you had taken it out while you were on board a ship and it got wet from the sea, that's typical. There was also sand residue on it, so they said they had used carbon in order to write - or to draw the maps on it. But it's very interesting.

32:44

AB: Absolutely, I mean this is just mind-blowing. I mean, there's three ways we can, even if you don't have the originals - there's three ways we can vet these things. First - and you've done a great job there I have to say - is internal evidence. We can check out everything and to see that - either can it be verified? Or can it be - I don't know the English word, but when something is probable. So, because it's not at all information that actually is possible to verify. There may be names that are lost, details that are lost, but we can see if it's at least possible, and that...

DM: Well, it is dated on the very edge of it. It has a date in Roman numerals. I think it's 1398, and it has a signature or a sigla of the person who made the map. And when I look at the sigla, I see an "A" with a "Z" over the top.

AB: "Z" could be Sinclair, though?

DM: It could be Antonio Zeno.

AB: Zeno, of course! I have that for our notes today, which reminds me I have to open the document about Zeno. Okay, but I was talking about everything, not just the map, everything can be vetted by internal evidence, and then...

DM: And that's what we tried to do. There are some things in there that you just couldn't know, and there are things that I would never know. Scott said, things that have to do with the numbers. I wouldn't have known that unless I was a Freemason.

AB: Right, right.

34:20

DM: Some things you wouldn't have known like a comet going overhead on a specific day, unless you were there. Because it happened once. You know, there are so many things in it that I just wouldn't know. Having to...

AB: Yeah, like he mentioned himself there is the "stones and bones" that you need native Indians to confirm.

DM: I wouldn't know that. And I wouldn't know that a Freemason had to write over the letter of introduction to other Freemasons. So there's...

34:48

AB: There's actually one more. I asked my guest Arvid Ystad, a Norwegian chap who has been researching Norse roads to masonry. I mentioned to him a couple of examples, for example, Henry Sinclair uses the word "hired". That's interesting. A forger wouldn't know that, but that word is actually, let's see what he says about it...

Yeah, so he refers to how the word "hird" means household originally. How that was used in masonry, it became, it got a religious - but this is in Norwegian, so I can't really simultaneously translate it right now, but it's interesting how these words were used by old Norwegian and Danish kings. Their entourage, you know the people around, are often referred to as a brotherhood. So Aethelstan used it when he was referring to the Freemasons. So you have small nuggets, and this is, I mean, even an academic wouldn't know these things. So you need specialists to pick up on these things. So that's...

DM: That's what they told me. They said especially on the crew lists, there were names from families in Orkney that you would have had to have been an expert on Orkney in order to know that those were men that were loyal to the Earl, and there's no way.

 

A few things stand out about this interview after reading parts of Diana's Henry Sinclair book. At first, Diana specifies that she was "at the library" in Greene County when a man there showed her the trunk downstairs containing the saddle bag, which is where it had been located since 1880. A bit later in the interview, Diana says the trunk and/or journals had "sat in the basement of this old home that used to belong to someone by the name of Cox". Immediately after this, she says "they found the trunk in the basement of the historical society".

So did Diana find these journals in a library, a house, or a historical society? It turns out all three of these could be reasonably accurate descriptions of a building in downtown Greeneville, TN, known as the "T. Elmer Cox Historical and Genealogical Library", which has been the home of the Greene County Genealogical Society since 2000. I would have to assume Diana is probably referring to this building, even though she never calls it by its full name.

However, there are several problems with this - for one, this building was constructed in 1949, and for much of its history was divided into multiple apartments. When local historian T. Elmer Cox died in 1995, he bequeathed his large collection and a sum of money to the Greene County Public Library, who used the money to purchase this building, located at 229 North Main Street in Greeneville. The purchase was made in 1997, extensive renovations were made, and it opened as a library in 2000. T. Elmer Cox himself never owned or lived in the building. So if Diana found the journals in this building, where were they located for over a century before the Cox collection was moved there?

I haven't been able to identify any other buildings or homes used by any historical or genealogical societies in Greene County which could possibly fit Diana's description. Part of the problem lies in the fact that she keeps the details conspicuously vague, never giving any formal place/organization names, people, addresses, or any other crucial details which could be used to verify her story. Certainly, a well-funded public library would keep a detailed catalogue of every historical item donated. The idea that they would give away part of their collection to a random visitor seems puzzling. Did these journals come from the collection of T. Elmer Cox or somewhere else? Why hasn't Diana included a more detailed history of the ownership of these journals, which the historical / genealogical society would almost certainly be able to provide?

Diana refers to Scott Wolter having some of the remaining journal pages "tested for C-14" and they were "tested right around the Civil War". She clarifies that although the journals were copies, her and Scott are convinced the map was original, made from sheep skin. She says "a friend at the University of Iowa who was a researcher there" was able to "Carbon-14 the map, and some of the original pages" specifically before Diana destroyed them. Diana claims "the map came back to 1400, plus or minus 50 years". This directly contradicts what Diana wrote in her book, that "no hard scientific testing of the journal pages has been done yet."

Whatever the case, since Diana now says she threw away all but a small portion of the journals, it is difficult to verify most of her claims. She insists that you simply have to trust her account as truthful. However, the more you learn, the more her mistakes and misfortunes always seem to serve a purpose. So many parts of her story rely on extraordinary coincidences, and are often contradicted by more reliable sources. At times, Diana asserts her extensive educational background and genealogical expertise, but when this doesn't fit her narrative, she plays ignorant and unfamiliar with the methods and standards of conducting proper historical research.

Diana mentions watching the television show "The Curse of Oak Island" in 2014 when she first realized the importance of the journals she had in her possession. Take note that although Diana claims she discovered the journals in 2005, she didn't read them in any depth or start translating them for nine years. Despite being a professional genealogist for decades, traveling to Greene County specifically to research the Weems and related families, and being told the journals belonged to John Weems, it took her almost a decade to realize she had important historical documents in her possession.

What a huge coincidence that the journals were not only directly related to a show she was watching, but also just so happened to confirm the genealogical theories she was attempting to solidify as facts in 2012 and 2013. Somehow, no other researcher has ever been able to locate a single historical document confirming any of the relationships between this specific Weems family in Pennsylvania, Thomas Weems of Abbeville, and John Weems of Greene County - or trace any of them back to Henry Sinclair.

In yet another attempt to get to the bottom of this, I decided to look into Diana Muir's personal background and her past genealogical work. After all, she's been doing this for longer than I've been alive and has published a vast amount of research on several other families in recent years. She claims to have connections to experts in academia all over the world. Surely this would all eventually make sense, right? I sincerely hoped so, and still tried my best to give her the benefit of the doubt.

Let me be completely clear - it has never been my intention to personally attack Diana or put any kind of unjustified negative label on her. I am simply doing what all genealogists do - researching the past, and following the evidence where it leads. All of this information I am presenting is public knowledge, gathered from Diana's own published biographical information and a number of articles accessible through newspapers.com. With that being said, here's what I found:

According to Diana Muir's Facebook profile and other public sources, her maiden name is Diana Jean Collier and she is originally from Iowa. She has also at times used the maiden name Hobert, which comes from her biological father. She got married in 1978 and started going by Diana Hanson, which is the name associated with much of her genealogy work through the early 2000s. She has lived all over the Midwest, including Iowa, Illinois, Utah, Montana, Nebraska and more recently Georgia, Michigan, and Massachusetts.

Diana first began working as a professional genealogist in the mid-1970s, giving seminars and offering her research services under the business name "Eire Institute of Family History" in Cedar Rapids, Iowa and Provo, Utah. Diana attended Brigham Young University around this time, and received her genealogy accreditation through LDS-affiliated organizations. 

Coincidentally, it is well-documented that the LDS church is no stranger to all sorts of fraudsters claiming to have important historical documents in their possession, only to eventually be exposed as con artists. One of the most famous such forgery schemes happened in the early 1980s. A man named Mark William Hofmann forged a number of historical Mormon documents over the course of several years, but when experts became suspicious and started questioning his credibility, he constructed and detonated three bombs in downtown Salt Lake City, murdering two innocent people.

https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/history/topics/hofmann-forgeries?lang=eng

You may recall Diana herself mentioning this story in her podcast interview, while defending herself against the idea that the Sinclair journals were a hoax, noting that she "didn't want to be identified as one of those people that did something like that."

Unfortunately, while continuing to dig into her past, I stumbled across an article published in The Billings Gazette on October 20, 1983 which reveals why Diana might be so concerned about "being identified as one of those people"...

So, there you have it - an earlier story about discovering important historical documents, which Diana later admitted she made up from her own imagination. If there's any doubt that this is the very same Diana Hanson, it isn't difficult to verify her sister's name and hometown mentioned in the article. I'll let you draw your own conclusions and not speculate on the motivations behind it. All I know is I see some glaring indications that history is unfortunately repeating itself once again with the supposed existence of these Henry Sinclair / John Weems journals. There are far too many similarities to ignore, and finally most of the pieces seem to be falling into place.

What about her educational credentials? Diana claims to have associate and bachelor's degrees from BYU, and also a master's degree in Music Education. Multiple online sources claim Diana has two PhDs - one in Education, and another in Technology and Change, from the University of Iowa. Other sources list a PhD in Anthropology, as well as Educational Leadership and various master's degrees. Diana's own public Facebook profile lists a PhD in Educational Leadership and Administration from the University of Iowa.

In my best effort to be a thorough investigator, I personally contacted the registrar's offices at Brigham Young University and the University of Iowa. Both schools were able to confirm to me that Diana Collier / Hanson / Muir has NOT earned any degrees from either university.

No associate degrees, no bachelor's degrees, no master's degrees, no PhDs, or anything equivalent can be found on record. BYU confirmed Diana was once enrolled in classes there, but never earned any degrees. I was able to confirm Diana also attended Drake University before BYU, but again no degrees were earned. Diana doesn't have a single verifiable educational credential since she dropped out of BYU in the mid-1970s.

Notably, Diana also claims she "became an accredited genealogist for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Mormon Church) in 1975, the youngest accredited genealogist ever." However, as far as I can tell, the LDS church itself has never offered a genealogical accreditation or certification of any kind. Diana is not mentioned in any available LDS publications, literature, or directories. There is no evidence she has ever earned accreditation for anything, by the LDS church or any affiliated organization.

Several websites, including Academia.edu, have erroneously attributed a book called "Reflections in Bullough's Pond" to Diana, along with several related articles and papers. However, further investigation shows this author is actually an environmental historian named Diana Muir Appelbaum (born Diana Karter). She is roughly the same age as Diana J. Hanson / Muir, which might explain the confusion. When performing a cursory search, it isn't immediately clear that these are actually two completely different, unrelated people with similar names.

Additionally, there seems to be a misconception about the website Academia.edu, which is a for-profit open repository of academic articles, and is not associated with any university or institution for higher learning. The domain name was registered in 1999, before regulations required .edu domains to be held solely by accredited educational institutions. At times, Diana has appeared to lean heavily on her Academia.edu profile as some kind of official credential, despite the fact that anyone can register an account and upload their writings. I suspect Diana has avoided distinguishing her own work from that of Diana Muir Appelbaum in order to appear more credible.

It isn't hard to find plenty of additional information in newspapers across the Midwest from the 1970s and 1980s documenting Diana's various alleged transgressions. Since none of it appears to be directly related to her genealogical research, I won't go into detail, but thought it was worth mentioning. Suffice it to say, a clear trail of deception and problematic behavior seems to follow wherever she goes. In recent decades, her interactions with internet genealogy communities appear to be a continuation of this pattern, and I wouldn't be surprised if what I've found so far is only the tip of the iceberg.

To be clear, I'm not sharing this story because of personal vengeance or a grudge-filled desire to trash someone's reputation. I care very deeply about family history and documenting the past with as much accuracy as possible. I've spent countless hours researching my own ancestors, and while I'm not a professional, I believe I am somewhat capable of distinguishing documented facts from rampant speculation or pure fiction. I also believe it is my responsibility as a researcher to correct any obvious misinformation I come across.

Don't get me wrong - there are plenty of verifiable facts included in Diana's research. I'm not disputing that. Unfortunately, when you learn the truth about her past, it becomes impossible to trust any of it. Clearly, Diana appears to be using real info to make the fictional parts of her own story seem more believable. How could anyone trust a so-called "professional" with such a poor track record to research and document the lives of their ancestors? Sometimes she might be correct when the research is easy enough, but far too often, the details of certain lineages simply do not check out. I'll hand it to her - the way she is able to gather bits and pieces of real information and stretch them to fit her agenda is an impressive and undoubtedly labor-intensive feat, if ultimately worthless.

Given all of the available evidence, I no longer believe Diana's Sinclair/Weems journals ever existed, just like by her own admission, the Joseph and Emma Smith papers never existed. Perhaps Diana visited Greene County, Tennessee in May 2005, but there is no reason to believe she was ever in possession of any journals written by any Weems ancestors. All of the available evidence seems to point to this story being fiction. I believe Diana is attempting to rewrite the history of our Weems ancestors, based on nothing but her own imagination and a collection of carefully selected records which have been stretched, misrepresented, and embellished to fit her agenda. This is not the work of someone who is genuinely interested in finding the truth.

I worry that without bringing these issues to the attention of other researchers, Diana's persistent efforts of sharing her imaginary historical connections will take precedence over the real story of our ancestors. I can't help but wonder how much Weems research over the last few decades has been tainted by Diana's contributions. It would partially explain why I've had so many difficulties at every turn, and why there is so much conflicting information floating around. Ultimately, it's one of the main reasons I decided to re-examine everything from scratch and start this blog. I would advise any other Weems researchers who have relied on any unverified internet sources to use a similar critical eye going forward.

Unsurprisingly, I am not the first person to question Diana's credibility. In one particular exchange in the comments section of Scott Wolter's blog, Diana said "I also don't ask anyone to accept what I say without question. Read the book, challenge the sources, do your own research and decide for yourself." For once, I find myself agreeing with her. I've taken her advice and done my own research, and it turns out quite unsurprisingly, hardly any of Diana's claims hold up to scrutiny.

The truth is often more fascinating than any story you could ever make up. Because it's real, and ultimately that's what genealogy is all about -  getting to know our ancestors as real people, not just chiseled names on forgotten tombstones. It's a huge disservice when the gaps in our knowledge get filled in with myth and fantasy, passed down through the generations while the real stories become lost. There is value in understanding how the lives of our ancestors affected who we are today. The past is not just some imaginary story on a piece of paper - it's all around us and a part of us. That's why the truth will always find you. It has a tendency to get in the way of easy answers, sensationalism, and shameless deception.

If anyone can show evidence that anything I've posted is inaccurate, please bring it to my attention and I will be happy to post a correction. All of the information presented here has been thoroughly researched and vetted, and it is not my intention to misrepresent any of the facts. Most importantly, I have no doubt that the Diana Hanson who lied about the LDS journals in 1983 is absolutely the same person who now goes by Diana J. Muir and claims to have discovered journals belonging to John Weems of Greene County, TN. If you have doubts, feel free to do your own research and come to your own conclusions.

(Some images have been edited for optimal clarity, efficiency of space, and protection of privacy.)