A Winchester News-Gazette profile of Goodrich isn't independent corroboration of his China Institute of America affiliation — its author also wrote Liberty Fund's own biography of him

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A December 2017 profile of Pierre F. Goodrich in the Winchester News-Gazette — his Indiana hometown paper — states that Goodrich "became a member of the Mont Pelerin Society, the China Institute of America, the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), and The Institute for Humane Studies." At first glance this reads as independent corroboration of the China Institute of America affiliation described in claim-goodrich-china-institute-of-america-trustee-met-mei-at-wabash, arriving from a venue with no formal tie to Liberty Fund.

It is not independent. The article discloses its own lineage: "Portions of this biographical summary written by Dane Starbuck appeared in The Goodriches, An American Family, The Liberty Fund." Starbuck is the author of that Liberty-Fund-published family biography (2001) — so this piece is the same author and source family as Liberty Fund's own history page, republished in an unrelated venue rather than independently researched. It also carries no China Institute trustee date range and never mentions Y.P. Mei; it names Wabash College only for Goodrich's own ties — his B.A. there and the board-of-trustees seat he held until 1969 — never in connection with Mei. So even granting the affiliation itself, it corroborates nothing about the specific 1948-65 range or the 1950-51 meeting central to the open question.

The general lesson generalizes past this one case: a claim appearing in a venue unconnected to the original source is not thereby independently sourced — genealogical independence (a different author, working from different research) is the thing that counts, not merely a different masthead.