Family stories as historical evidence

Many amateur family historians invoke “family story” as if it is an inviolate truth. “We know our own family history!” they say. As a simple response, I would like to remind readers of the many people who believed their grandparents to be their parents and only discovered the truth when they purchased their own birth certificate. Or the number of people who, according to descendants, arrived in Australia as “remittance men” or as “free immigrants” but proved to be convicts. Families have secrets and agendas, and the truth regularly goes by the wayside in attempts to pursue these agendas or to cover up unpalatable truths.

Let me mention some family stories passed down through my own family. There was the one included in a hand-written family history produced in the late 1800s or early 1900s. It claimed that my great-great-grandmother was the granddaughter of “Count Fabian of the celebrated Italian Fabians”. This family history helped nudge me onto the path of becoming a family historian. As a newbie, I wrote to the Italian consulate asking about this family, and received the reply that I would need to provide specific names and dates. A few years later I went to England and tracked my great-great-grandmother’s ancestry. The alleged Italian Count Fabian was in fact Thomas Fabian, a hairdresser from Portsmouth!

Then there’s the ubiquitous Rob Roy McGregor story. My grandfather was told that his grandmother, Janet McGregor, was a direct descendant of Rob Roy; he accordingly named his two sons Rob and Roy (my father). My grandfather was not an ignorant man: he was an architect and later Director of Public Works in Western Australia. Evidently these family stories had been convincing and I, naturally, grew up believing them. By the time I started researching this section of my family history, however, I had many years of research experience and had learnt to roll my eyes (metaphorically, naturally!) whenever anyone made claims of “illustrious” ancestry, so I didn’t even pursue it. Eventually I realised that I should check it out, just in case ... I marshalled all my skills and I tried and I tried, but all I could come up with was that Rob Roy’s brother might have lived in the neighbouring Argyleshire parish on the west coast of Scotland. My ancestors did not even live in Rob Roy territory!

Oh, that’s right, there is also the story about my First Fleet ancestor William Nash, a marine, who was reportedly promoted to the rank of Captain and sent back to England to fight in the Battle of Waterloo, taking his son John with him. According to the story William was killed there and John later died of his own injuries. First of all, the records of Waterloo show that William and John were neither present nor injured/killed. Secondly, William had been discharged from the army in the 1790s. Thirdly, William left the colony in 1804, seemingly on a ship that foundered in the Torres Strait with the loss of most lives. And so on.  Eventually, I was able to determine that this story must have begun with William’s “widow”, as the story itself was found among descendants of her son, who ended up in Inverell, and her daughter, who ended up in the Monaro district, these branches of the family having gone their separate ways while their mother was still alive. The hidden truth was that William’s wife had deserted her husband for another man who supported her and her children, and that William himself abandoned his young children when he decided to leave the colony. Secrets; secrets.  

Have I made my point?

Check out such family stories, of course. They might be true – or at least have a grain of truth. But in the words of an old Encyclopaedia Britannica:

Genealogy, like every other branch of knowledge, must … submit itself to recognized scientific methods and … frankly admit where descents hitherto accepted can no longer be satisfactorily proved.

Family stories are a form of “hearsay” evidence. Hearsay evidence is rarely accepted in the law courts because the person who made the original claim cannot be questioned to determine the veracity of their claim.

Family stories are essentially myths that can only be accepted in the historical debate if there is primary-source evidence to back them up. If the evidence refutes the story, then I am afraid researchers have to accept the evidence rather than continuing to believe the story. Otherwise, they might as well be tracing a fictional family – not their own family history.

Marriage Witnesses - II

When examining a church register, I first trawl through the baptism, marriage and burial registers noting every entry for those with my surnames of interest. I then go back through the witness section of the marriage register looking for any marriage ceremonies witnessed by those with my surnames of interest, just in case I find something useful. This proved particularly helpful in tracing one problem family.

My husband is descended from a Samuel Mann of Ullingswick parish, Herefordshire, who married a woman named Elizabeth Wilson in Worcester (some 25kms away). They later emigrated to Australia. Elizabeth’s Australian death certificate noted that she was born in London around 1814 and was the daughter of William and Jane Wilson. Common surname and given names; family on the move: there were few leads to help me trace the Wilson family. But as it turned out, I had a surprising piece of luck.

While pouring through the Ullingswick registers looking for the witnesses to marriages, I made a startling discovery. One marriage was witnessed by Samuel Mann and Elizabeth Wilson – a year before Samuel Mann married Elizabeth Wilson. It had to be his future wife. So I went back through the registers, searching a fifty year period for any Wilson entries and found only two: the baptism of a child to a William and Jane Wilson a few years previously, and the burial of a 19 year-old William Wilson around the same time. As the surname was uncommon in the parish, and as the parents of the baptised child had the same given names as Elizabeth’s parents, it was clear that the Wilson family spent a few years in the parish during their travels, enabling Samuel and Elizabeth to meet. Although Elizabeth’s baptism entry has still not been located, the burial entry of the boy William helped me trace the Wilson family back to their origins.    

Remember the old adage that success is 10% luck and 90% hard work? Perfect example here. Exhaustive research ultimately pays off.

Don’t forget the witnesses: an under-utilised family history source.

Second edition of "Writing Interesting Family Histories"

With copies of Writing INTERESTING Family Histories flying out the door, the time came for a new print-run. Did I reprint the first edition or produce a new edition? Since the first edition was published, I’ve had lots of thoughts about additional information I could include so, despite being ridiculously busy, I decided to expand the book and produce a second edition. By ordering a much larger print-run, I’ve been able to retain the price of the first edition.

The new edition is one-third larger in page length than the first edition with additional tips scattered throughout the publication. If you already have a copy of the first edition, why don’t you ask your local library to order a copy (they can do so through their library suppliers). As they will receive a copy of the second edition, you can still benefit from the additional information without having to buy another copy.

Beware the ignorant genealogist

It would never have occurred to me that researchers could be so frighteningly ignorant of simple research principles if I hadn’t come across practical evidence of this problem twice in a matter of weeks.

Genealogy is a science, a form of detective work. It uses scientific methodology, the same used by detectives. If our police force used the approach that these ignorant researchers use, our gaols would be full of innocent people.

The first rule of thumb in historical detective work is that researchers must assume that a primary source record is accurate unless they have incredibly strong evidence that proves that it isn’t.

So what is a primary source record? It describes source material that is “closest to the person, information, period or idea being studied”. When researching the past, it relates to a “document that was created at the time being studied by a source with a direct personal knowledge of the events being described”. An example of a primary source record is a death certificate. It was produced at the time or shortly after a person’s death and provides details of the death; that is, the name of the person, the date and place of death, cause, and so on.

By contrast, “secondary source” is a work that combines, filters and analyses, drawing together a wealth of primary source material to produce, for example, a history book or family history. Within that work it may include a photocopy of an original record (a primary source) and a discussion about that original record (secondary source).

Primary source records also include a mix of primary source and secondary source information. So what is the distinction between primary and secondary source information in any historical record? It is easy to work out. A death certificate is attesting to a death so the details of death – a body at a certain place on a certain date – are pieces of primary information. Everything else, that is, details of the deceased’s birthplace, parentage, marriage, offspring, etc, on that particular death certificates are pieces of secondary information because they did not happen at the time of the event in question (that is, the time of the death). They come from the “memory” of the informant. To obtain the relevant primary source information one must seek out the deceased’s birth certificate, marriage certificate, children’s birth certificates and so on.

Sometimes the secondary source information on a primary source record is incredibly reliable. A good rule of thumb is that, if the known secondary source information is accurate, then the unknown information is also likely to be accurate. For example if the death certificate lists the deceased’s age at marriage and ages of children and you can confirm that the age listed for the deceased at marriage and the age of one of their children tallies with the details provided in the relevant marriage and birth certificates, then it is likely that the ages of the other children are accurate as well. 

However if the known information is inaccurate, then one must assume that the unknown information is also problematic. For example, if the birth certificate for one of the deceased’s children indicates that the child’s age on the parent’s death certificate is wrong, then you must assume that the ages of the other children are problematic as well.  

Primary source records can be wrong. But researchers have to accept that they are accurate unless there is proof to the contrary. Anecdotal evidence is not proof. For example, the suggestion that the date on a person’s birth certificate must be wrong because the family always celebrated their birthday on a different day is not “proof” that the birth certificate is wrong. If, however, one finds a hospital record logging the mother’s arrival and the baby’s birth, and the date of birth in that source differs to the birth certificate then that might override the birth certificate. Why? Because the hospital log is an impartial source that is even closer time-wise to the event in question. In fact, it is likely that the birth certificate was prepared from those hospital logs so it is possible that the person preparing the birth certificate made a “typo”.

Anecdotal evidence referring to a past event is not primary source information even if it is found in a primary source record like a newspaper report or a letter or a diary. How do we know that? While the anecdotal information may come from a person who had a personal knowledge of the event in question, it is not documented at the time in question. As time passes, and as anecdotal information passes from one person to another, it becomes more and more unreliable. This is because it springs from memory, one of the most unreliable sources of surviving information – as anyone who has studied psychology can attest (our memories neaten information, fill in the gaps and distort it so that it fits into a comfortable framework without us even realising that it is happening). And remember the children’s game called Chinese Whispers? Exactly the same thing happens with anecdotes. “I wonder if so-and-so could have been involved in ...” becomes “So-and-so was involved in ...” The more time passes, the more hands the information passes through, the one thing we can be absolutely certain is that anecdotal evidence does NOT describe what happened.

This is where one of these two ignorant researchers has come a cropper. The researcher believes that if a primary source record does not tally with the anecdotal evidence, then the primary source record must be wrong. He apparently uses a “history” (a secondary source) prepared decades later by a policeman who had no personal knowledge of those involved in a series of incidents to make statements about the origins of the people in question and publishes refutations of the primary source records that reveal the truth.  

He has failed to abide by this piece of wisdom: “In contexts such as historical writing, it is almost always advisable to use primary sources if possible, and that ‘if none are available, it is only with great caution that [the author] may proceed to make use of secondary sources’.”

What is really scary about this researcher’s claims about the individuals in question is that they are now being published in other texts, including academic works. Pointing out the primary source evidence that proves him wrong merely results in even more elaborate published refutations. Arrogance and ignorance are a deadly combination.  

This researcher as well as the other I mentioned previously both have agendas – even if they claim otherwise. In the second instance the woman evidently wants a First Fleet ancestor and states that her ancestor was a First Fleet marine even though the primary source records show him to be a Second Fleet convict. She claims that these primary source records were deliberately changed to record him as a convict. She quotes my own words in the General Musters I edited, that the musters contained lots of errors and inconsistencies, and says that the errors in her ancestor’s entries were among them. I was referring to spelling errors, a clerk mixing up the lines when he copied an entry, a convict confusing their ship of arrival, saying Indefatigable instead of Indispensable, and so on. But, like the other man, she has a brick wall up against the truth.  

There are times when anecdotal evidence that appears to disagree with the primary source record must be taken seriously: for example, tribal memories of an Aboriginal massacre that are not backed up by primary source records. In that situation, delving deeply and reading between the lines can expose a backdrop conducive to such an event happening at that particular time. However, research-wise, this type of situation is rare. Researchers must not consider that such rare exceptions override the simple detective principles that are fundamental to accurate historical research.

Let’s strive to document the truth when we are researching our ancestors. Surely, tracing “our” family history is what it is all about, isn’t it?

Marriage witnesses – I

I was talking in my previous posts about genealogists’ under-utilisation of parish registers. The names of marriage witnesses is one of these areas. The Hardwicke Act of 1753 regulated the marriage itself and the manner in which marriages were documented. From 1754 onwards, English marriage entries included the names and signatures (or marks) of the parties involved, that is, the couple being married and the witnesses. The names of the marriage witnesses can be an extremely important source of information.

Remember the case of Ann Carpenter from my previous post. The names of the witnesses to her marriage might help link her to the family of John and Margaret Carpenter. Witnesses were sometimes friends and sometimes family members. Those with large families often had a sibling or in-law act as a witness. Ann Carpenter (born 1776) might have met her husband through his friendship with her sister’s husband and that friendship led the sister’s husband to act as a witness to the marriage. The fact that a man married to one of John and Margaret Carpenter’s children acted as a witness to Ann Carpenter’s marriage is strong evidence of her connection with that family.

If you’ve produced family group sheets for all the families with the surname Carpenter in the area, you might have already noted this marriage in your family group sheets. Alternatively, look at the International Genealogical Index or Ancestry.com or one of the other online genealogical sites and see if anyone with the witness’s name married a Carpenter. In any event, it is always a good idea to try to determine the witnesses’ connection with the couple being married. You never know what might turn up.   

The witnesses can be helpful in other ways as well. I’ll discuss that in my next post.

First prize for Breaking the Bank

Breaking the Bank has just been awarded First Prize in the Society of Women's Writers Biennial Award for Non-fiction. The judge wrote:

It is my first prize. It is informing, entertaining and certainly taught me aspects of early Australian history of which I knew little. Carol's adoption of an active voice narrative of history gave it a liveliness that added to its interesting subject matter. I viewed it from the perspective of a teacher who would have loved to have used it with a good class. It would have gripped them.  

***Writing Interesting Family Histories***

It's back from the printers - my latest work Writing Interesting Family Histories. Amazing what one can achieve in a short amount of time when a deadline is approaching.

Over the past year, I have given a few seminars/workshops titled Turning Dry Facts into Exciting Narrative and found that I needed a good two hours to cover the subject in any depth. My seminar at the NSW and ACT Genealogy Conference on Saturday 19 September 2009 was to be the same subject but I would have little more than 35 minutes for the talk. Hmmm.

Then, at a recent talk, a lady asked me how to begin writing a family history, an area I hadn't covered in my talks as I would need another hour for that alone. It got me thinking even more.

So, being an author, I decided to write a book. Writing Interesting Family Histories is the result. It covers how to structure a family history, how to begin writing and how to make it interesting - even exciting. It covers the techniques I use to write my "riveting" popular histories.

Naturally, I scheduled the book's publication for the conference and officially launched it during my talk. The talk and book proved a great success. Astonishingly, I sold one-quarter of the print-run on the day!

Many people told me - as they purchased the book - that the talk was inspiring. One grumbled good-naturedly that the problem with us authors is that we don't finish our talks so the audience has to buy our books. Of course, to cover the whole subject in 35 minutes I would have had to talk faster than a race commentator!!! 

Great reviews have been published about the book and I've included some on the Reviews page. If you are interested in purchasing a copy, orders can be placed using Paypal or by cheque via my Orders page.

Parish Registers - II

I was tracing all the early Douglas families in New South Wales and came across twins born in 1814 named Mary Ann and Joseph. Later records proved that Mary Ann’s twin was in fact a girl named Elizabeth. So why was the child listed as Joseph in the baptism entry? The answer is quite simple: the parish clerk made a mistake.

Having edited many transcriptions of early records in addition to my 30 years as a genealogist, I can tell you that clerks often made mistakes. The baptism details were not usually recorded at the moment of baptism but at a later time. Although we will never know the reason for the “Joseph” error, just imagine the following scenario. The clerk is writing the day’s entries into the register while the clergyman is chatting about his next sermon – about Joseph. Bingo. The clerk writes what he is hearing, not thinking (I’m sure you’ve done the same yourself). And the beginner genealogist trying to find the birth of an Elizabeth Douglas in that area around 1814 comes to a dead end.

The opposite can happen as well. From other sources, for example, you’ve found that you’re descended from an Ann Carpenter who was born around 1775 in a certain English parish. So you start trawling through the church registers and find an Ann Carpenter born to John and Ann Carpenter in 1776. While there were a few Carpenter families having children around that time, there were no other children named “Ann Carpenter” baptised in the 20 years before or after, so this person is likely to be your ancestor. So you start checking around for siblings and the parents’ marriage – nothing. It’s as if the family suddenly appeared, then disappeared.

Now a pedantically thorough researcher doesn’t look for one particular person. In fact, pedantic thoroughness is another essential ingredient of a good genealogist, the reason why some manage to trace many ancestral lines back to the 1500s or even earlier.  

So let me tell you how to become a pedantically thorough genealogist. As you go through the church register, note down every baptism, marriage and burial for the surname of interest for at least half a century. When you go home, pick up a bundle of paper and beginning preparing family group charts. At the top of each sheet, note down the details of the first set of parents you come across, then underneath list the details for their child. You do the same for every entry in the parish register, adding later baptisms to the appropriate family group sheet for their parents as well as any marriages and burials that relate to members of the family, ticking off each entry in your notes as it is processed. Then you number each family group. As you look through these sheets, you work out that the child of Family Group 1 became the parent listed in Family Group 10. Gradually you build up a series of family trees for everyone with the same surname in the parish (and in neighbouring parishes if the surname is not too common and you are a very thorough researcher). Yet one family group sheet still lists only the parents John and Ann Carpenter and the baptism of their child, Ann. Could there be an error?

So you look more closely at the other family group sheets. That’s when you notice. John and Margaret Carpenter had children born in 1770, 1772, 1774, 1778, 1780; that is, every two years except for a surprising four-year gap in the middle. You’ve allocated all the burials to the appropriate families and this family doesn’t appear to have had an unbaptised child who died in infancy around that time. In fact, the four-year gap itself suggests that they didn’t have a child who died in infancy; when a baby dies the mother is no longer breast-feeding so she becomes fertile again and often has another child a year or so later – that is, around 1777. So could Ann Carpenter, reported to be the daughter of John and Ann Carpenter, have actually been the daughter of John and Margaret Carpenter?

Yes indeed. Note that, in the baptism entry, the mother’s given name “Ann” is the same as the child’s given name. This is one of the most common errors made by parish clerks. As they fill in the register, they accidentally repeat the child’s name instead of writing the correct name for the respective parent. 

So how do you prove that Ann Carpenter was in fact the daughter of John and Margaret? I’ll discuss that in my next post.   

Parish Registers - I

A genealogical friend was paying a county researcher in England and asked about access to the Protestation Rolls for 1641-2 for that county. These are an extremely important genealogical source, effectively an adult male census, as they list all the males over 18 in a parish who were in favour of and not in favour of the “true Protestant religion”.

The researcher responded that she didn’t know where these records were located and would find out. My friend responded with surprise and – I suspect – some indignation (I mean, if the professional didn’t know how to access such an important source, how “professional” could she be!). The researcher’s response was enlightening. Few genealogists manage to trace their ancestry back before the mid-1700s, she replied, and she’d never been asked before.

So why don’t most researchers succeed in tracing their ancestry further? The simple answer is that they fail to make the best use of the resources at hand. Let’s start with the English parish registers.

The registration of baptisms, marriages and burials essentially began in 1538, and the resulting parish registers are the most important source of genealogical information for the centuries prior to civil registration (which began in England in 1837). Yet even though the parish registers may be the only source of information for many individuals, they still remain an under-utilised genealogical tool. Indeed some researchers don’t use them at all. They find an appropriate baptism reference in the International Genealogical Index and put the details in their pedigree chart without bothering to check the parish register itself. Big mistake! The baptism may relate to a child who died in infancy - many did. It is essential that genealogists actually examine the church registers. Microfilm copies of many of these registers can be easily accessed through the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (I’ll discuss the Mormons and the International Genealogical Index in another post).

Most genealogists who do examine the church registers look only for their possible ancestor. Having found a suitable individual, they circle around looking for sibling baptisms and the parents’ marriage and any relevant burials. They then search for the parents’ births and continue the same process. Not surprisingly, they hit a brick wall fairly quickly.

So how do we better use the parish registers? I’ll discuss that in my next post.

Beginnings - IV

So, as discussed in “Beginnings – III”, we’ve begun our calculations by locating the year of birth of a couple’s middle child and subtracting 30 years – the time-frame of an average generation. Now what do we do?

We get a piece of paper and quickly draw up a horizontal line-graph covering 100 years and begin marking what we know for the husband and wife, a line for each, one atop the other.

For the father, close one end of the window by subtracting 17 from the year of birth of his eldest child as he probably wasn’t any younger than that; the resulting number is the latest year he is likely to have been born.    

It is much easier to pinpoint a female ancestor’s likely birth time-frame because of her sometimes prolific child-bearing and the limitations in her fecundity. Child-bearing between the ages of 16 and 47 is a neat window to lay over her life. Subtract 16 from the year of birth of her eldest child and 47 from that of her youngest child. If she had enough children, you can pin-point her likely birth time-frame to within a year or two.

A husband was generally born within five years of his first wife. Sometimes he was younger, although generally by no more than two or three years (admittedly my own grandfather was six years younger than his wife but the stink that created in the families shows how abnormal that situation was).

If you plot these details for the husband and wife along a line-graph one above the other, and shade in the areas, the window of opportunity starts becoming clearer. Subtract the good old three-score-and-ten from their death years (if you’ve found them) for another point of reference. Narrow the window after 75 years, narrow it again after 85 years, close it at 100 years. Don’t ignore possible baptisms that fall within these outer edges of the window of opportunity, but concentrate on those in the middle first.  

While these suggestions will not tell you exactly when your ancestor was born, they will help pinpoint a likely time-frame for you to concentrate upon when beginning your search.