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%.

Author: Mike

By way of background, I have over forty years experience as a software engineer. I enjoy genealogy as a hobby, which I started in earnest in 1994. I've always liked family history. Now whenever I uncover some fascinating fact about an ancestor, I also take time to read about that era in history. Whether it be the Napoleonic Wars, the Erie Canal, Steamships, the Port of Hamburg, or hurricane tracks, there's always something new to learn. By 2000 I published my family tree on the Internet. Unfortunately there were no software tools then that did precisely what I wanted. So I created GED-GEN, a Windows program to automatically generate a genealogy website. It converts a GEDCOM data file to a series of web pages in family group sheet format. Since 2002, people from all over the world have used GED-GEN for their websites. Today I continue to research my family history, with the help of distant cousins. I am also actively creating digital images of my collection of genealogical evidence.

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