Spoilers follow, although the main spoiler is that they didn't follow up enough to provide any real answers.
My biggest problem with this (apparently defunct show) is that they seem to only be willing to do maybe a search in one genealogical database and maybe do one radiograph test in order to learn the story of each object. Maybe a Google search, too, but not every time.
From the first episode, for example: They find a stone which on the surface seems to be a confession by a man named John Nair that he deserted the Battle of Brandywine. They allegedly do a radiograph analysis which demonstrates that the stone appears to have been carved a long time ago, and apparently not as a forgery. Cool.
Then they do some unspecified research and determine there was a Fifer named John Nair, and that, since he wasn't a combatant, it makes sense that he would have run away (thus slandering all historical Fifers, it seems to me).
What they don't do is apparently research even one other available detail of John Nair's life. No context for his death. No explanation of what might have led him to carve a shameful fact about himself in stone and leave it on or near the ground in Scranton, PA. If they tried and couldn't come up with anything- cool. But there's no indication they even tried to look.
Hoping to learn more, I googled the terms John Nair stone. Turns out a stone more or less matching the description was unearthed by a Scranton man named Scheer or Scherer in 1911. This result comes up even before any reference to the latter day "finding" of it.
Evidently the show's "researchers and experts" didn't bother to Google the main details of the stone to learn it's already been found.
So what's the deal? Did the man who claims to find it somehow end up with the stone via some uninvestigated but perhaps interesting chain of custody? Did it somehow slip out of history and end up in his yard? How? Was there more than one similar stone? None of this is mentioned, and it's presented simply as if the man found it in his flower bed.
I did find a 2012 online post in a forum about identifying Brandywine participants in which a Kierah with a Penn State e-mail address claims to have found a stone with the same text, and if the man's wife is mentioned in the show, it didn't mention her name, so at least it appears there was a claim to a subsequent finding of the stone that significantly pre-exists the show. But still....no Google search, History Channel?
The idea that this stone may have been written to shame John Nair after he was executed for desertion or otherwise died in infamy is never even mentioned except very briefly at the very beginning, and strikes me as a lot more likely than the idea that he sat down and carved it in stone as a confession.
But the show leaves all of the above as "Yep, real stone. Probably a confession by John Nair who ran away because he was only a Fifer."
Later in the same episode, a couple finds a c. 1700 dagger and flail in a field in Western Massachussets. They figure out the approximate age, mention that daggers like that were sometimes stuck into graves as rememberances as a matter of local tradition, and that's it. No research on the history of the property where it was found. No ground penetrating radar in the area to see if it was found in or near a lost graveyard. Just a super surface-level google-type investigation, propped up by a basic metallurgical analysis.
The best investigation they did during the episode was in debunking a rune stone type thing in Tennessee as part of a 1950s horseshoes game kit.
My biggest problem with this (apparently defunct show) is that they seem to only be willing to do maybe a search in one genealogical database and maybe do one radiograph test in order to learn the story of each object. Maybe a Google search, too, but not every time.
From the first episode, for example: They find a stone which on the surface seems to be a confession by a man named John Nair that he deserted the Battle of Brandywine. They allegedly do a radiograph analysis which demonstrates that the stone appears to have been carved a long time ago, and apparently not as a forgery. Cool.
Then they do some unspecified research and determine there was a Fifer named John Nair, and that, since he wasn't a combatant, it makes sense that he would have run away (thus slandering all historical Fifers, it seems to me).
What they don't do is apparently research even one other available detail of John Nair's life. No context for his death. No explanation of what might have led him to carve a shameful fact about himself in stone and leave it on or near the ground in Scranton, PA. If they tried and couldn't come up with anything- cool. But there's no indication they even tried to look.
Hoping to learn more, I googled the terms John Nair stone. Turns out a stone more or less matching the description was unearthed by a Scranton man named Scheer or Scherer in 1911. This result comes up even before any reference to the latter day "finding" of it.
Evidently the show's "researchers and experts" didn't bother to Google the main details of the stone to learn it's already been found.
So what's the deal? Did the man who claims to find it somehow end up with the stone via some uninvestigated but perhaps interesting chain of custody? Did it somehow slip out of history and end up in his yard? How? Was there more than one similar stone? None of this is mentioned, and it's presented simply as if the man found it in his flower bed.
I did find a 2012 online post in a forum about identifying Brandywine participants in which a Kierah with a Penn State e-mail address claims to have found a stone with the same text, and if the man's wife is mentioned in the show, it didn't mention her name, so at least it appears there was a claim to a subsequent finding of the stone that significantly pre-exists the show. But still....no Google search, History Channel?
The idea that this stone may have been written to shame John Nair after he was executed for desertion or otherwise died in infamy is never even mentioned except very briefly at the very beginning, and strikes me as a lot more likely than the idea that he sat down and carved it in stone as a confession.
But the show leaves all of the above as "Yep, real stone. Probably a confession by John Nair who ran away because he was only a Fifer."
Later in the same episode, a couple finds a c. 1700 dagger and flail in a field in Western Massachussets. They figure out the approximate age, mention that daggers like that were sometimes stuck into graves as rememberances as a matter of local tradition, and that's it. No research on the history of the property where it was found. No ground penetrating radar in the area to see if it was found in or near a lost graveyard. Just a super surface-level google-type investigation, propped up by a basic metallurgical analysis.
The best investigation they did during the episode was in debunking a rune stone type thing in Tennessee as part of a 1950s horseshoes game kit.
