Family Research Grows Better with Skepticism and Mistakes

I love finding books that relate to my family's history. It's great finding information about their lives and times and even better when there are facts about what they lived through. But sometimes those wonderful facts should be treated with some skepticism. Footnotes, bibliographies and acknowledgments show that writers have done their research but where did the facts come from?

Sometimes facts come from official sources. Those are pretty safe especially if you rely on the original document rather than a transcription. Errors can creep in during the copying process. But sometimes information was incorrect when the document was first made. Maybe the informant wasn't sure of the baby's name or the bride or groom increased the status of their father's job. There are all kinds of reasons for errors. My own marriage certificate was incorrect. My maid of honour shows as Norman rather than Norma (the JP's name was Norman and he got carried away when he added the witnesses to the certificate.)

Facts can come from interviews. Genealogists are advised to ask their family members questions to find out facts about their family. But how reliable are the facts that come out of those interviews? Memories can be faulty. I have a copy of a questionnaire that my mother filled out about her family for my brother. The information she gave him had her grandfather, James, as the first immigrant to Canada on her maternal line but it was her great-grandfather, also named James, who was the original immigrant who traveled from Scotland to settle in Ontario. As I got that information early on but after I knew the correct immigrant generation, I learned to look at the information coming from memories with some skepticism. 

There are many places where errors can creep in to your precious research. But they aren't all down to other people. Many of them are due to our own mistakes. It is so tempting to accept the first facts that answer a research question but are they truly the right information? Even our own research finds should be treated with a degree of skepticism so that mistakes are minimized.