The New Year is an opportunity to
make resolutions. Now, whether you
follow up on those or not, I’ll leave to you!
I was reminded of a
great one for genealogists – understand the provenance and history of the
document you are basing your family tree on! Basically, make sure that you analyze every
document both for its content and also for its provenance and also for its
genealogical value.
Just this past week
as I was working to substantiate a lineage for a client, I determined that
there was one “prayer book” which was referenced several times and purportedly
included data back to the mid-1800s.
Upon closer examination, I noticed two items about this “prayer book”:
·
The
hand-writing is the same on the first so many pages
·
The
publication date is 1912
Given this, we
convincingly know that this was NOT a real-time publication for the stated
events. The information was written as
much as 150 years after the fact and without other documents independently
corroborating what is stated, the contents at best serve as nice clues.
The above was just
a simple example of why we need to carefully examine the documents we come
across.
For me, a related
element is that when I abstract or summarize a document, I make sure to note
anything that could have relevance in the future even if I don’t know the
importance now. For example, for many
documents, when abstracted, people love to leave off who were the
witnesses. Those witnesses are part of
your ancestor’s FAN club as documented via wills, land
records, bonds and many other documents. I’ve also come across abstracted
records where only the entries for known forenames are pulled out. You need to document everyone of your surname
of interest unless you know for a fact that no-one else with that surname in
that community was related to your ancestor.
I don’t know about
you and I prefer to only revisit original records if I know there is something
juicy to be pursued versus visiting the same documents time and again because I
was less than complete in the information I summarized and so I need to keep
revisiting to verify the document’s details.
Here are some
resources that will help you with just this:
Don’t forget that I
haven’t discussed looking for documents that can’t exist and yet people look
for! Possibly another New Year resolution worth
discussing!
What suggestions/tips would you offer about the best way to
analyze a historical document?
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