Most of us have been told that good family history means adding source citations. Citations matter, but they are not enough on their own. What actually makes family history accurate is building a body of evidence that supports your conclusions. Understanding the difference between these two things will change the way you research.
There are no facts in family history. There is no proof. We cannot prove the past. What we can do is gather evidence, analyse it carefully, and draw reasonable conclusions from it. A small caveat: a handful of things are certain. You exist, so you had parents, grandparents, and so on. But who those people were, and everything else about them, is not a fact. It is a conclusion.
Every person you add to your family tree is there because you concluded they belong. Every date, every place, every relationship is there because you concluded it was correct. This is not a weakness in genealogy. It is simply how the discipline works. The goal is not certainty. The goal is to make your conclusions as reasonable as the evidence allows.
Poor-quality family history happens when researchers add people and information without analysis. Recognising that matters, because the solution is not just to cite your sources. It is to improve your research, sharpen your analysis, and build stronger evidence.
Why one source is never enough
A single source citation does not provide sufficient evidence for a reasonable conclusion. Any source can contain errors. You can also make mistakes when interpreting information, no matter how experienced you are. This is why building a body of evidence is so important.
You may have heard the common advice that you need at least two independent sources to support a conclusion. The intention behind this is sound, but the statement itself is misleading. What matters is not the number of sources. It is the quality and weight of the evidence within them. Two sources may be enough in some situations, but in others you will need more. Especially if the evidence is indirect or the sources contradict each other.
There is another problem with the “two sources” rule. For many events, finding two truly independent sources is genuinely difficult. Take a person’s birth as an example. The primary source is usually a birth certificate or a baptism record. Other sources that mention the birth date (census records, death certificates, marriage certificates) typically copy that information from the birth record. They are not independent. They are derivatives of the same source. Counting them separately does not strengthen your conclusion.
Look for indirect evidence
When you cannot find a second direct source, look for indirect evidence that supports the same conclusion. For a birth, this might mean checking whether the parents married before the child was born, or comparing the birth dates of siblings to see whether the pattern is consistent. Children born to the same parents tend to arrive one to two years apart. Gaps or inconsistencies in that pattern are worth investigating.
I cover other techniques for finding and evaluating indirect evidence in other articles on this blog, and in my book The Good Genealogist.
A real example: when new evidence changes everything
Here is an example from my own research.
I have never found a birth or baptism record for my great-great-grandmother, Christina Malchow, who never married. Her birth year was estimated as around 1862, based on her age at death as recorded in an inquest report, and the date of her parents’ marriage. At the time, that conclusion was reasonable.
Then new evidence arrived. DNA testing indicated that her father was not her biological father. This discovery changed everything. The indirect evidence from her parents’ marriage was no longer applicable to her birth. The estimated age at death may itself have been based on the same marriage date, which meant that evidence was also suspect. The new evidence suggested she may have been born before 1862.
I have written about Christina’s story in more detail — you can read it here.
This example illustrates something fundamental about genealogical conclusions. They are not permanent. They are your best answer given the evidence available at the time. When new evidence arrives, or when you develop your skills and revisit earlier research, you may need to revise them.
What makes a conclusion reasonable?
A reasonable conclusion is one reached after a reasonably exhaustive search for evidence, using the best available sources, and applying careful critical analysis to what you found. It does not mean you found every possible source. It means you searched thoroughly, weighed the evidence honestly, and documented your reasoning.
Source citations are part of that documentation. They show where your evidence came from and allow you, or another researcher, to re-examine it later. But they are the record of your evidence, not a substitute for analysis.
Keeping your conclusions current
Good researchers revisit their conclusions. As your skills grow, you will sometimes look back at earlier work and see gaps in the evidence or weaknesses in the analysis. New record sets come online, new tools become available, and DNA testing reveals information that documentary records cannot. These things mean that a conclusion you reached years ago may now need revision.
This is not a sign of failure. It is a sign that you are doing family history properly.
If you’d like to learn more about building evidence, evaluating sources, and other research methods, my online Genealogy Research Methods course starts again on 11 July. Follow the link to register.
About the Author
Danielle Lautrec is a genealogy educator, researcher, and author of The Good Genealogist. With qualifications in history, family history, and historical archaeology, she teaches for the Society of Australian Genealogists. Danielle convenes the Society’s Legacy Software Users Group and the Source Citations Group and is co-convenor of the Society’s DNA Research Groups.
