Mistakes and misinterpretation

Family history sources do not always say what they should say and sometimes they do not say what we think they say.

Mistakes can occur in any source, yes, even original sources.

Common causes of mistakes

Makes can occur when:

• incorrect information provided by an informant
• the person recording the information mishears the informant, due to accents, pronunciation, poor hearing and so on
• the person recording the information incorrectly adds information
• information incorrectly copied from another source.

Mistakes can be minor and easily detectable, or they can significant enough to cause problems for your research.

An example of a minor mistake is where my maternal grandfather’s birth certificate has his own name where his father’s name should be recorded. This mistake was obvious to me, since I knew both of them, but I could also have detected it by comparing his birth certificate to his marriage or death certificate. This is one reason why you never rely on just one source.

An example of a more significant mistake is where my paternal great grandfather’s death certificate records his wife’s place of birth instead of his own. This kind of mistake could send you off on ‘wild goose chase’ for years.

Sometimes it is not the informant or the creator of the source that makes the mistake. Instead, it occurs when the researcher misinterprets the information in a source.

Common causes of misinterpretation are:

• errors made while deciphering handwriting
• misunderstanding the information, the source or the event.

Fortunately, you can minimise the chance of misinterpretation by:

• improving your skill at deciphering handwriting
• learning more about the type of source, its purpose and the terminology in it
• learning more about the type of event that the source is depicting or the time period in which it occurred.

Examples

Death and burial are two separate events. You need to be clear whether the source that you are looking at is dealing with the first event, the second event or has information about both. Do not use the burial date as the date of death unless a source says that they occurred on the same day.

If the event occurred before civil registration began in the area, you will only have church burial records, as deaths were not registered. What confuses some people is that the database that the source is extracted from may not make that distinction. For example, Ancestry groups burials and deaths together in a database called Australia Death Index 1787-1985. The early records, for example NSW before 1856, are burial records and the later ones are death registrations.

Birth and baptism are also two separate events. Again, be careful that you do not record a baptism date as the birth date. Although burials usually occur within three days of death, the same cannot be said for baptisms. They can occur the same day, a few days later, or even years later. My paternal 3x great grandfather, for example, was born in 1824 in London and not baptised until 1841 in Sydney!

Other common misinterpretations

• Do not assume that the place that a birth, death or marriage is registered was the same place that the event occurred. Always check the source, not just the index.
• Places may be described differently depending on the type and purpose of the source. For example, electoral rolls describe a place by electoral district and Findagrave describes a place by local government area. Neither are appropriate for place names in Australian family history.

More information

Mistakes in sources are a good reason to use more than one source to reach a conclusion. You might like to read my other post on this topic, How Many Sources Should You Use?

For more of my articles about analysing sources, go to the Analyse page.