It's important to ensure that the sources you use for your family tree research are high-quality and reliable. In this post, learn the steps you should take to evaluate your records.
Believe it or not, if you have ever done family tree research, you have already gone through the process of evaluating genealogy sources. It occurs every time you find a record containing information and decide whether it is relevant to your research, and if it is reliable.
You have probably found records that you decided not to use, or that you did use but feel uncertain about. This is good, since it means that you have a discerning eye for finding accurate information for your family tree.
We want to use good sources for our research because if we don't, we run the risk of having errors in our family tree. Big errors in our tree can cause us to end up researching the wrong family entirely, adding incorrect people to our trees.
Fortunately, there steps that you can take to make sure that a record is helpful and can be trusted as a source for your research. Below, you'll find these steps, as well as an example of how I evaluated a source for my family tree.
Steps to evaluate your genealogy record
When we start evaluating a genealogy record, we typically have a specific question or objective in mind. For example, we might be trying to find out when our ancestor was born, or who their parents were.
With our question in mind, we then look at the source and the information it provides to see whether it makes sense to us. We can follow the following steps to see whether we should use the information in our research or move on to a different record.
Relevance
The first and most important step of the evaluation process is to decide whether the record is about your family or the ancestor that you are researching. It is very common to find records that are about people with the same or similar names who may have even lived in the same town.
Deciding whether the record is relevant to the person you are researching is key.
When it comes to records that have the same or similar names, I have noticed that this is more common in large cities. To exclude some record possibilities in this case, I sometimes have luck researching the incorrect families as a process of elimination.
Category
Some types of records tend to be more accurate than others, which is why we need to evaluate the category of record that we have found. The reliability of a record will depend on who created it, when it was created, how the author of the record got their knowledge of the event, who provided the information, and even assumptions that we might make when interpreting the record.
For example, we usually find that a vital record, such as a birth certificate, to be a very reliable source. The doctor and record keepers are typically impartial participants, and both parents are usually available to provide information.
Death certificates, on the other hand, can sometimes be less reliable - depending on the question that we are trying to answer. The information on a death certificate is often provided by children or grandchildren of an elderly person, and they might not provide accurate answers to questions asked.
Just because a record is less reliable than another record doesn't mean we don't use it. We can use it, but we might want to look for other records that can be additional evidence to backup our theories.
Format
Ideally, we want to rely on original documents or copies of those documents. If we have copies, we want to make sure that the information is legible and that we aren't making assumptions about missing or illegible information.
Very often, we might find information that is not in its original format. This occurs when we have indexes, abstracts, and transcriptions of documents.
Mistakes can occur during indexing and the creation of abstracts and transcriptions. However, it is often possible to locate the original record using the information that you acquire from the index, abstract, or transcription.
Nature of information
Was the information recorded by someone who was present at the event near the time of the event (a primary source) or by someone who wasn't there, or who recorded information about it much later (a secondary source)?
Secondary sources can be just as accurate as primary sources, but we do need to understand who provided the information for the record and when they did so. This can help us determine whether the record may have inaccuracies, and whether we should search for more evidence surrounding the event.
When we find a record that doesn't seem to be enough evidence on its own, but we want to use it because we trust the source of information, we can use it as long as we don't have any records that disprove the source.
For example, if I find a census record that says my Irish ancestor's child was born in 1870, but I have evidence that shows my Irish ancestor didn't arrive to the United States until 1871, I technically have evidence that disproves the child's 1870 birth as a child of my ancestor.
I would need to spend more time finding out if the child on the census was actually my ancestor's child, where they were really born, and more evidence as to when they were born before I could come to any conclusions.
Directness of evidence
Is the evidence in the source circumstantial evidence, or is it direct evidence of the question you are trying to answer? This will help you decide how much weight to give your source in your research.
For example, if you are researching Mark Barns and you notice a George Barns listed as a witness on his daughter's baptismal certificate, you may assume that Mark and George are related, perhaps as brothers. This would be circumstantial evidence.
However, if you locate birth records for both Mark and George and see that they both have the same parents, then you have direct evidence that they are related.
Consistency and clarity
The source is more reliable if it seems to match up, or be consistent with, with other sources that you have located concerning the event you are researching. Additionally, you should make sure that details such as spelling of names, places, as well as dates, make sense to you.
Likelihood of events
If the record that you have found seems to show something that was unlikely, even if everything else seems to align, you should be skeptical and look for additional evidence.
I can't tell you how many times I've seen a sourced family tree online show children born to 10 year old parents, or a marriage that took place in the year 1815, 3000 miles away from where the person lived the year before and the year after the supposed marriage. Of course, these things may be possible, but they aren't likely.
Establishing proof
We can never prove anything with 100% certainty in genealogy, but we can collect multiple sources for each fact that can help us feel very confident about the accuracy of our research.
For example, if we have a birth record, multiple census records, and a death record, that all state the same birth year and/or date, we can feel pretty confident that we have "proven" when our ancestor was born.
If our research has a lot of weaker sources, we may feel that we need to have even more sources in order to feel good about including certain facts in our trees.
Example of evaluating a genealogy source
My Dutch great-great grandfather came to the United States in the 1880s, and I believed that I had found the passenger list of the boat that he traveled on from Rotterdam to New York. The record that I found seemed to line up with his immigration year reported on census records, but I was not absolutely sure that I had found the right passenger list for him.
To confuse matters more, my aunt told me that he had absolutely not come through Ellis Island and had somehow gotten to Chicago directly from the Netherlands.
So, with the question of "what year did my ancestor come to the United States", I evaluated a new piece of evidence.
I recently came into the possession of a letter that I believe was written by my Dutch great-great grandfather's sister to the family in the United States after my ancestor's death. In this letter, she appears to describe, from her perspective, the beginning of my ancestor's trip to America.
Since my great-great grandfather died in 1930, I wasn't able to meet any other relatives who knew him well enough to tell me these kinds of stories about him. Needless to say, I was very excited to find this letter.
The letter is dated 1932, so it was written well after my great-great grandfather's transatlantic trip that is supposed to have occurred in 1887. Since about 45 years had passed since the event, this is important to take into account when evaluating this source.
Due to the fact that I located this letter in a box with photographs and other sources on this side of the family, I feel confident that the source is relevant to my ancestor. The category of the evidence is an original letter written by my ancestor's sister, which I felt was a trustworthy format.
The nature of the information gives me a bit of pause, since even though the letter was written by his sister who witnessed his departure from Holland, she wrote this letter 45 years after it happened. She was a much older person at this time, and 45 years is a long time to remember some of the details.
However, since I don't have any records that dispute her account and actually have several other records that seem to verify her story that provide consistency and clarity, I feel like I can put my hesitation to the side. After all, her account is direct evidence of what she witnessed that day.
Because I have several other records and even family lore that states that my ancestor came to the US in 1887, the account stated in the letter seems very likely. And of course, the fact that I exist today in the US is additional evidence that my ancestor came here!
Since this letter is one of several sources that I have pertaining to my ancestor's journey to the United States, I think I can now mark the question of time and place of his trip "proven".
Conclusion
I hope that this post has helped you understand more about how to evaluate the quality and reliability of the genealogy records and sources that you locate.
If you have any questions about something that you read in this post, or if you have a question about a specific source that you've found, I would love to hear from you in the discussion below.
Thanks for reading today!