One of my many-times great grandfathers is William Reynolds, a resident of the Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts no later than 1636, and possibly earlier, who married Alice Kitson, and who moved to Maine (after a land grant from the governing Mass. Colony) in the 1650's. He is almost surely not the same William Reynolds of New Haven and Providence, RI, around the same time frame. Several Reynolds family historians and members of the Reynolds Family Association have been trying to set this straight for years. Countless genealogy researchers have made this erroneous assumption and have linked the two in their online family trees, including those posted on the very prominent Ancestry.com. The following are just two exerpts from the Reynolds family reunion publications, the first from the 10th Annual Reunion of the Reynolds Family Association pamphlet:

"Remarks by Rev. F. B. Cole"
(...text omitted for brevity; his supporting evidence is strong and extensive...closing statement follows) "It does not seem to me that the William Reynolds of Plymouth and the William Reynolds of Providence can be one and the same man. So there we have another man to account for. Dr. Street, you will remember, at one of the meetings that said William Reynolds of Providence had come from New Haven, and he referred to the old town lot which William Reynolds had plotted. I simply want to make this statement, because in these matters, if we are going to fill a book, accuracy is the first law. Traditions and guesses and suppositions are not history. They are not genealogy." (In other words, he was angry that the connection was made on supposition...)

From the 12th Annual Reunion of the Reynolds Family Association pamphlet:
(..again, some text with supporting discussions omitted for brevity) "..If William Reynolds was in Providence in 1638," (the previous paragraph outlines his many references to one William's unbroken record of residence in Providence), then "what was William Reynolds doing up in Plymouth in 1638, marrying Alice Kitson? Afterward, in 1638, this same William Reynolds and his children are mentioned at Plymouth, and by a grant of the Court land is given to these children because the father was a servant of the colony."

So, once again, people are building family trees without documentation, making the work of the researchers dedicated to accuracy work harder.