Playing Detective
One of the most enjoyable parts of genealogy for me is playing detective. When I was a kid, I used to sit under the mimosa tree with an Agatha Christie novel and a box of Junior Mints and try to beat Hercule Poirot to the solution of a puzzle. Trying to pick out which clues mattered, where someone was lying, and what chain of events was most likely was a blast.
Often when working on a genealogical puzzle, I find myself in a similar situation -- staring at information that is incomplete and conflicting and trying to figure out what really happened. Just the other day I spent hours on the simplest of questions -- when was the person born? -- and loved every minute of it. Are you a genealogy nut like me? Or does spending hours trying to figure out a person's birthdate just seem silly? Maybe I can convince you that it is fun by describing all the tips and tricks I used to get a (tentative) answer.
So who were these "witnesses"? What might have caused them to misremember the information, make a mistake, or outright lie? To figure that out, I had to consider how each source was created and whether I could trust the creator to be diligent about getting the information right. It's helpful to consider the Five W's here:
- Who created this record? (Who is the informant -- recorded on death certificates, for example.)
- What is the record (A legal document filed with the state? Or a scribble on the back of a photo?)
- Where was the record created? (Was a form filled out in the hospital or was a memory recorded in a biography?)
- When was it created? (The day of the event? Years later?)
- Why was it created? (I've seen people who are underage lie about birth years so they could get married.)
For example, Etta's husband was the informant on her death certificate. A spouse's recollection of a birthdate would be more credible than the memory of a neighbor or grandchild, who didn't know the person in question as well. Of course, the most credible source possible for a birthdate would be the birth record itself -- made exactly at the time of the event and by people who were there. That fourth question is important -- as the years pass, we can forget. Unfortunately, I did not have a birth record. The earliest record I had was the 1900 Census, created three or four years after Etta's birth.
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An interesting story about when a record was created. In DeHart Cemetery, near my third great grandparents, Jesse and Annie Smiley, are a number of grave markers for small children. One of them memorializes a "Bureaugard Smiley" who purportedly died in 1863. No other records of Bureaugard exist. A crucial facet of this record is its apparent age. This one grave marker is shinier and less worn than those around it. Clearly the stone was not erected in 1863. A host of questions emerge: Is there family lore about this poor infant and a descendent decided to add this memorial, decades later? Was there another marker here that was worn with age and replaced? If so, why are the other stones listing lost children, some of whom also died in 1863, still what looks to be the original stones? This is a mystery I haven't yet solved.
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Etta's grave marker, like her death certificate, has the birth date 22 February 1897. That date, however, conflicts with other records -- like that 1900 Census, which has her at 4 years old. This is, as I said, the earliest record and it points to 1896 as the birth year. To make the situation even more difficult, the 1900 Census has a column for the person's birth month. The enumerator put down "May 1986." Now that's quite a distance from February 1897!
As I worked with these records, I realized that I needed more context. I asked myself if either of the proposed birthdates (May 1896 or February 1897) wasn't possible because the birth of a sibling was too close to one of those dates. I considered the area that Etta lived in -- a small, rural community where the census enumerator might know neighbors well. Etta was older than her husband -- and in the context of a society where that is unusual, could she have fudged her birth year. That didn't pan out, either, because she was three or four years older than her husband, and a "fudge" of one year wouldn't address that.
I reached out to fellow genealogists. Sometimes a sounding board is crucial. In fact, asking the question about how close her birth was to the birth of her siblings was recommended to me by one of my fellow genealogists in WikiTree's Appalachia Project. We floated ideas, found sources, and discussed possibilities on our chat.
In the end, however, it was a moment of thinking outside the box that solved the mystery. I was making tables with the information from each source and shaking my head as the data just didn't line up. "Etta Mae, Etta Mae," I groaned, "when were you born?" A light bulb flashed! Etta Mae were you born in May? Or did an enumerator write your middle name in the month column?!
That did it! I figured it out by:
- Asking the Five W's
- Considering context
- Talking through it with a sounding board
- And thinking outside the box
To see the final solution -- still iffy, but probable -- of when Etta Mae (Woodard) Brendle was born, click that link and read the research notes on her profile.
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