Hollingsworth Register has spent nearly twenty years debunking many falsehoods in print and trying to publish the corrections. For instance, "Descendants of Valentine Hollingsworth, Sr." (1925) by Joseph Adger Stewart, is known for its errors. However, Stewart corrected errors put forth in print by William Baker Hollingsworth in his "Hollingsworth Memoranda" in 1884. Stewart's errors were honest. His were omissions or the placing of certain lineages in the wrong column, so to speak. That could have been, and probably was, a result of his accepting material from donors on face value. (The D.A.R., at its outset in the 1890s, accepted many members as "real daughters" of Revolutionary soldiers, on their say-so with almost no documentation. What a dreadful mistake this proved to be later, when the lineages were proved false when a later descendant wished to join!) WBH put in print one of the worst falsehoods in the whole Hollingsworth story, and this is, in a way, why we write this disclaimer now. The myth of "Catherine Cornish"! Lord help us. Back with us again. We thought it was truth, not fiction, which, when crushed to earth rises again! But here is Myth - Untruth herself - rising up again to scare and to daunt us like a gruesome, lurid phoenix from its putrid ashes!

Wm. B. Hollingsworth seems to have relied foolishly upon a letter written in 1824 from one Henry Hollingsworth to another. In this, the writer says their name (Henry) came from Henry Cornish, High Sheriff of London, who was the father of a Catherine Cornish who was the first wife of Valentine Hollingsworth, Sr., and, consequently, their ancestor, through Valentine's son Henry2 Hollingsworth. He left the Friends to become more prominent and in favor with men... aside from the fact that he had been condemned and disowned by the Quakers for allegedly fathering a bastard child (HR Sep 1973,p. 75). In other issues of this journal we have shown that there were Cornish families who were Friends in Pennsylvania and involved with Henry2 Hollingsworth, but no relationship has been found. (See: Henry Cornish - Political Martyr, in HR Sept 1970, pp. 83-86; A Cornish Connection? in June, 1973 p. 59, Sept 1969, p. 99, and other references too numerous to mention.)

We have received two letters in 1983 to the effect that your editor told somebody in writing that "Katherine Cornish" wife of Henry Hollingsworth ... father of Valentine1 Hollingsworth, Sr., ... died 1675, was the "Daughter of Edward IV. of York." Well, that is worth a big, healthy belly laugh, folks. If Hollingsworth Register were in the business of making up falsehoods in genealogy and history, do you think that we would have Katherine Cornish dying in 1675, and be the daughter of King Edward the Fourth who died in 1483 over two centuries before? As Roy Orbison would say "Mercy!" Yes, Good King Edward has been dead half a millenium - 500 years. April 9th marked the day. We can trace a probable origin of this almost inconceivable error to our magazine in this way:

In HR June, 1974, at page 60 we published the happy story of the marriage of Jacqueline Hollingsworth, of our Wexford family, to Admiral William Right Hollingsworth of the Valentine Hollingsworth family.