Thank you so much for the response Chickazoola. I like how you always respond in a non-passive aggressive manner whenever I have lots of questions and read everything I have to say and what you said there was very helpful and I took a lot away from that to remember for the future, though I had a few things I'd like to ask/add.
Firstly, I trust Baseball Reference a lot and they're one of my top places to look for stats as well as the basic biographical stuff. I did email them about image issues over the years and what I don't understand is why they only changed some but not all of them, such as Jacob Doyle, the Ed Beaven/Ned Connor thing, Bill Tobin, as well as still having not added images to pages like Lou Meyers so I don't really understand the method there. As you said nothing is concrete but they replied every time saying they'd fix them all but still haven't. The John Fox picture is still there too incidentally. I thought most of this stuff was all confirmed to have been debunked by SABR for years now.
Until the Autumn of last year or there about I always kind of assumed this thread was just full of a bunch of people doing their own research as their own thing and just posting it all here and didn't really realize there were so many high-up SABR people here working this (which could be understandable given that we're all just anonymous faceless usernames on a forum quite literally dedicated to discussing a video game). Before that I just used to ask every high-up and even semi-famous members of the 19th century committee who I worked with what they thought since I was like "well these guys must know everything to have gotten the reputations they do" since I didn't really think that everyone would probably have their own fields of specific expertise on different aspects of things and that they were just knowledgeable about everything related to the topic inside and out in every way.
As for Ernie Hickman, I am aware that the papers usually didn't have photographs printed in them at the time so I'd say if you're looking for a depiction of him to probably try to be on the lookout for a drawing.
I don't use Wikipedia much really anymore. I noticed they have SO much wrong and missing information on early baseball players and it'd take too long to go through all of it for me and also most baseball historians seem to prefer to spend their time contributing to projects that are specifically dedicated to the topic of baseball exclusively (while as we know, Wikipedia is a vast catalogue of articles and bios about all sorts of different things in general).
For the most part I have mostly worked with biographical stuff and I am quite knowledgeable with a pretty good portion of it all but I do not claim to be anywhere near an expert yet. I certainly have more knowledge about early baseball than probably most of anyone my age though). I started contributing to the baseball research world even before I was a SABR member with the BR Bullpen. It is alright in the sense that it's run almost entirely by SABR members but it was essentially built from the ground up by a handful of guys who still edit it daily for the past 20 years. Definitely don't count on it as a source if you're looking for references to use for a big project that you intend to publish or something since it's all just a collaborative effort of everyone trying to cover every corner of the game all at once so there is definitely times where I'll spot something incorrect that's been there for years and change it but I still do have a ton of respect for what those guys do.
The reason I mentioned Richard Hershberger was because the biographical stuff that the BA guy included about Hickman and since Hershberger has one of the biggest collections of clippings and he does have a lot that aren't all digitalized yet, he may be able to help if he does by chance happen to have any from the East St. Louis area from the time. Again I am not super close with the guy but it's still a possibility so I emailed him yesterday morning but haven't heard back yet. All the information the BA guy included seems awfully specific so I very highly doubt he'd intentionally try to spread lies on the internet about an obscure baseball player that only a handful of people heard of. I won't rule out the possibility of it being a mistake but I can't say it is a mistake either since it could possibly be true and we don't know yet.
Another thing I want is to follow up on the part about the internet being unreliable and the spread of misinformation. This is a great point you make but I also want to point out that the already difficult task of trying to differentiate fact vs fiction on top of the internet spreading misinformation at times, we also have the fact that many newspapers from long ago were notorious for getting names, spellings, middle initials, teams played for and more wrong. Not only that but also details becoming fuzzier as stories are passed all over the country and interpreted. Imagine it like that telephone game that children play where they whisper something and it goes all around the circle until the last person says it and it's completely different than what the first person said. Some more examples would be like how Fatty Briody was incorrectly reported to have been dead years before he actually died, Win Mercer and the alleged Ladies Day incident, the details of Jim Creighton's death, numerous Rube Waddell tales, Ruth's called shot, and more.
Here is an article that The Sun published after Hickman's death, incorrectly reporting that he had played for the Baltimore Unions:
"St. Louis, Nov. 10 - Ernest Hickman, who in the days of the old Union Association was a well-known baseball player and pitcher for the Baltimore club and later with the Western League, shot his wife in East St. Louis to-day and then committed suicide. Mrs. Hickman is probably fatally wounded. There was a terrible struggle between the husband and wife. The woman was shot in the head, but escaped from the house and entered the house of John Canty next door, where she fell unconscious. From the surroundings it seems that Hickman, after taking his revolver, grappled with his wife and forced her on the bed, shooting her before she could get away from him."
There was other papers who reported incorrect details of his death as well but that's just one example.
Anyways thank you once again I appreciate it greatly.
Oh and one last thing I forgot, apparently the outdated missing player list comes up on this website
https://sites.google.com/site/tnfoto...ng-player-list