Being unsure is a pretty common thing in genealogy. It is an inherent part of research to be uncertain and to work to reduce the uncertainty. One of the things that can go wrong in research is to forget to have doubts.
Usually the uncertainty we have is because we suspect we might have the wrong person, have records that disagree, or that have secondary information. There are certainly other reasons why one might feel uncertain.
Sometimes the records themselves tell us that we should be uncertain—not in any implied way way either, but quite explicitly. One of my favorite census records* has a marginal note made by the enumerator. It reads “The best information I could get.” That is pretty clear. It tells us that even the enumerator doubted the quality of the information. It also tells us something of the difficulties enumerators faced. In this case it was interviewing without a common language. It may also tell us something about the personality of that enumerator. It is easy to forget that our ancestors weren’t just the ones who were recorded, they might also have been among the ones who did the recording. If your ancestor was the one who made that note, what would it tell you about him? It wasn’t every enumerator that left warnings about data quality, though many should have.
This week I was reading some old English parish registers, or to be precise, bishop’s transcripts. I ran into another example. An entry in the 1628 christenings caught my eye, because it didn’t quite fit the pattern of the others. It added the word “supposed” in front of the word son. The minister who wrote that might have meant that the child was illegitimate. He might have been expressing his doubts. If it is the latter, it might be telling us something of the minister’s personality. What makes the record just a little bit stranger is that this register does not list the mothers of any children, so we have no idea who the one certain parent was and we are told to doubt the one named.
Eleven days later when the child was buried, he was once again identified as the supposed son of his father. These are records that explicitly say that we need to be uncertain.
* Yes, I have favorite census records, it’s an occupational hazard.