A Preponderance of the Evidence can be still be Wrong

With genealogical evidence, you should not trust any one source to be accurate. I contend that even a preponderance of the evidence is not necessarily accurate. Researchers often look for corroborating evidence from other sources before accepting a fact as true. Various sources have different weights as to their trustworthiness and accuracy. But it can still be a mistake to draw a conclusion based on a given set of sources.

For instance someone’s date of birth taken from their death certificate has a greater chance of being incorrect since their birth happened so many years beforehand. The person filling out the death certificate may only be guessing the deceased’s birth date. The birth date is seldom verified with other official records when the death certificate is filed.

Birth certificates are considered more accurate because they are recorded soon after birth, when everyone involved is sure when it happened. However a clerk generally recorded births in a ledger book. Sometimes these ledgers were themselves re-copied several years later. So even a “birth certificate” is subject to transcription errors and recording mistakes.

Even if a birth record and a death record each point to the same birth date, that date is not necessarily accurate. Two or more inaccurate records do not make an accurate record.

That is why citing a source in genealogical research is so important. You, or a subsequent researcher may happen upon another source in the future that corroborates or refutes a given fact. All sources will again need to be weighed for accuracy before another conclusion can be drawn. Any genealogical fact has an inherent degree of accuracy that is never 100%.

Two Children with the Same Name

Sometimes you will find a birth or baptism record for a child, but the parents already have a child by that name. Chances are the first child died as an infant or youngster and the parents named a subsequent child using the same name. This was probably a way of honoring the first child. You will most likely find a death record for the first child before the second child’s birth.

German Middle Names

It was quite common for our German ancestors to call their children by their middle names. In the same family, several children could have the same first name, such as Anna or Maria, or Johann. These children were known and called by their middle names. See for example my fifth great-grandparents, Peter and Christina Marx. They had four daughters having Anna as a first name: Anna Maria, Anna Margaretha, Anna Catharina, and Anna Gertrude.