A Rankin researcher and blogger recently stated, "If you want to continue believing that Lt. Robert was at Valley Forge, you might want to skip" a future blog post that the researcher has yet to publish. The researcher, who is a Rankin but is not from the Lt. Robert Rankin part of the tree, is implying that she can prove Robert was not at Valley Forge. I heartily disagree and doubt his presence can be disproved.
To reassure Robert's descendants, I have painstakingly retraced my previous research to again convince myself that Robert was indeed at Valley Forge, and I have learned a bit more than I already knew, especially about Robert's enlistment. The PDF linked below is the conclusion of that process.
http://freepages.rootsweb.com/~nivek/genealogy/charts-reports/Thompson/narratives/Robert-Rankin-Valley-Forge.pdf
Unless some miraculously unexpected piece of new evidence appears, I am confident that Robert Rankin was indeed at Valley Forge and that the researcher's claim is mistaken. Only time will tell, but I am certainly comfortable with the current analysis and conclusion.
As a final note, Robert Rankin is a well-known and accepted ancestor for the Society of the Descendants of Washington's Army at Valley Forge. Given the focus of the Society, they probably know more than just about anyone about Valley Forge and the soldiers that wintered there with George Washington. This is all the more reason to suspect that the Rankin researcher's claim is unlikely to be true.
