The Records are Confused

There is an interesting phrase one runs into in genealogy. It is “the records are confused.” When I first started out in genealogy, back when I was a kid, I thought that was a very strange phrase. It seemed to imply that those records sat around after the courthouse closed scratching their headings and not being sure of anything. Of course, that isn’t what the phrase means, but the question isn’t really what the phrase means, but rather what it might indicate.

A Record is Confusing

Some records really are internally inconsistent. A document can contain actual errors, so that if all the information in it is taken at face value, obvious nonsense is the result. That is probably the closest thing we have to my imagined records that sit around wondering what they might mean. Other records just seem to be internally inconsistent. I once read a will that did not make much sense. Then I realized that the will referred to two different people who had exactly the same name. Until further research showed that the author of the will had an aunt and a cousin of the same name, that will was certainly confusing.

Boundary changes can also be sources for “confused documents.” It is odd, but sometimes a record will not line up with history. I’ve run into a few cases where a deed says that a man purchased land in a county before the county existed, or sold land in a county after that county was discontinued. The full explanations of such things might never be known but I suspect the confusion I saw to have arisen from a difference in time between the writing of the deed and the copying of that deed into the county records. If names and boundaries changed in the time between those events, what might the clerk write in the register of deeds? Quite possibly he wrote something confusing.

A Group of Records is Confusing

Sometimes records seem fine on their own but don’t line up with each other. I have six records relevant to a man’s death:

1. a slip of paper with the most important dates in his life. It was written by his mother between 50 and 80 years ago,
2. the page from his mother’s family Bible that records his death,
3. his burial record,
4. his death certificate,
5. a photograph of his grave marker.

Before I get to the sixth, I need to discuss the dates on those five records. The first four agree on the day and month. The grave marker has only years. The Bible record, the grave marker, the death certificate and the burial record all have the year of death as 1926. The slip of paper records the year as 1925. There can be little doubt that the agreement between the death certificate and the burial record would outweigh just about anything else. With the Bible record and grave marker also in agreement, there is little reason to trust that slip of paper. I don’t know when his mother wrote it, or how good her memory was at the time. All I can say in its defense is that all the other dates on it are corroborated by records made at the time of the events in question.

Now the sixth document. It is a telegram sent to the man’s mother. There is no question that it was sent to her. It has both her name and her address on it, and I can verify the address using many other records. The telegram has been passed down in the family, so there is no question about its provenance. The telegram calls her “mother,” so it is clearly from one of her children. She only had two children and there can be no confusion between the two. Given the name that appears at the bottom of the telegram, it is from her older son, who is the man in question. It was sent from a small city a few hundred miles from the place where he and his mother both lived, but that is as expected for a man who was a traveling salesman and wanted to send his mother birthday greetings when he was out of town. The telegram was sent on his mother’s birthday too. The problem was that it was sent on his mother’s birthday in 1927, almost a year after he died. Not being a mystery writer, I can only conclude that Western Union simply put the wrong year on the telegram, yet that would normally be a pretty trustworthy place to find a year. This record would seem to be confused, but only those other records make the problem clear.

The Researcher is Confused

Often what is meant by “the records are confused” is that the researcher is confused. My first experience with the phrase was in a typed document of unknown origin sent to me by a friendly archivist. It purported to trace several generations of the family that I was researching. When my 11-year-old head stopped spinning, I had worked out that the person whose records were confused could only be explained by being the daughter of her father and his own mother, who would have to have been…wait for it…the daughter in question. That is, she was both her own mother and her own grandmother. This was long before the days when anyone could accidentally tie their database into knots with an unfortunate click or an ill-timed computer crash. How do we avoid confusion like that? We can start by not trusting all information in secondary sources and family recollections without question. Then don’t struggle to make it all fit together if it defies logic. Go back to contemporary records and try to find as many records relevant to the question as possible. Finally, try to find sensible resolutions to the inconsistencies that appear, even if it means arguing that some of the hard won data is wrong.