Showing posts with label Conflicting Evidence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Conflicting Evidence. Show all posts

Sunday, March 5, 2017

Attend NERGC 2017 to Hear Warren Bittner and Increase Your Wicked Good Genealogy Skills


It’s such a great opportunity to talk with Warren Bittner, one of the best speakers on doing genealogy better. The first time I heard Warren speak, he talked about the importance of source citation. If anyone in that auditorium wasn’t already using source citations, they were by the time Warren finished.

NERGC 2017 provides five wonderful opportunities to share Warren again. 

  • On Thursday afternoon, April 26, will discuss “Death Records as Starting Point.” 
  • Friday morning he jumps into German genealogy with ”Where Was Your Ancestor Really From? Germany’s Shifting Borders.” 
  • Friday afternoon he speaks twice, “Writing to Engage Your Reader,” and “Complex Evidence: What It Is, How It Works, And Why It Matters” (one of the best speeches ever! Anywhere! I reviewed it here). 
  • Saturday morning Warren will discuss a perplexing issue in genealogy, “Understanding and Researching Illegitimacy.”


Warren, you are one of the best evangelists I know for putting quality into our genealogy work – the focus of my own blog. How did this become a focus of your own work?

Well, I had an interesting experience where I had been doing research for about 20 years, professional research for 7 or 8, and thought I knew a lot about genealogy. I hadn’t read the National Quarterly because when I looked at the articles they didn’t interest me. They were about people I wasn’t related to and geographic areas where I didn’t do research. Then I read a few articles, and every article I read amazed me at the quality of the research and the depth of the methodology in solving difficult problems. I can honestly say my genealogy education started the day I started reading the National Genealogical Society Quarterly (NGSQ), and the quality of the research that I saw demonstrated in the articles published there made me realize how sophomoric and uninformed my own research was. After that I went back and read 20 years of the Quarterly and learned how the best genealogists think and how they solve the most difficult research problems. It also took the quality of my own research up ten steps. 

About three years ago I was in conversation with Thomas W. Jones, current co-editor of NGSQ, and related this experience to him. He looked at me and said “Warren, I had the same experience, but for me it was 30 years. I had a Ph.D. and thought I knew how to do research, and my education started when I began reading the Quarterly.”


I hear you have a master’s degree in history. How did your history major and your love for genealogy enrich each other?

I was considering becoming a CG or an AG and then I realized that professional licensure as a genealogist was recognized in the relatively small world of serious genealogical researchers, but a Master’s degree is universally recognized. So I made the decision to get my Master’s degree before I went after licensure. It was a good decision because my history degree introduced me to a broad spectrum of historical concepts that I didn’t realize and that I didn’t understand. Concepts like how to read beneath a document to unearth what the document is telling me about the people in the historical document and the people that wrote it down. I learned about micro-history, where an in-depth study of an otherwise insignificant person or event can be used to turn upside-down generalizations made in histories of a broader scope.


What is your favorite part about teaching and lecturing?

I enjoy seeing the light that comes into the eyes of my students when I see that they are learning something in the lecture, and the hope that comes onto their faces as the mental wheels begin to turn and they see ways of looking for the ancestors they have almost given up on. 

The Demanding Genealogist is proud to be an official blogger of NERGC 2017.

Thursday, September 29, 2011

How Do We Notice Conflicting Evidence?


It just so happens that an essay about a conflicting-evidence case is the sixth portfolio element in an application to become a Board-certified genealogist.[1] As a board member, I’ve spoken a handful of times about the certification process. Often audience members will ask if a particular case they have would qualify as a good portfolio element. I can’t answer that question; there is simply no way for me to know based on a two-sentence description when many documents and quite a bit of study would be needed to even know what the case is. However, in a broad way, I have a few guidelines.

I think that we sort through conflicting evidence very often in our research. The thing is, we sift it out fairly quickly. How many times have you used a city directory and found more than one person by a name? Quickly, we realize that we are tracking the William Snow who lives on Broad Street and not the one who lives on Main. Recently, I was following the Thomas H. Roberts who was a funeral director in Detroit and not the one who was a carpenter, although it did occur to me that carpenters could make coffins. One of my friends told me she was tracking a Patrick Murphy and the two men by that name both had wives named Mary. Fortunately, she knew which occupation each had.

Looking at these problems from outside our own mindsets, we could also say that we had conflicting information. We could say that Patrick Murphy lived at two addresses for a number of years. My friend ended up doing a conflicting evidence analysis on the two men so that she could sort out exactly which one’s death certificate her client actually needed — and how she’d recognize the right certificate when she found it.

In my work on the Welles family, I’ve frequently found situations in which two men with the same name live in the same town during the Revolution. It seems that within five generations there were enough cousins naming children after grandparents and uncles that confusion can reign. I found two instances of men named Josiah Welles marrying a woman named Anna Stillman. Only one was correct. There is an article there if I ever find the time to write it.

If we can grasp the conflict before we sift it out, we might be able to capture something important. So, the next time you find conflicting evidence, think, “There might be a journal article in here someplace.”

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[1] Board for Certification of Genealogist, The BCG Application Guide (Washington, DC: Board for Certification of Genealogists, 2011), pp. 6-7, http://bcgcertification.org/brochures/BCGAppGuide2011.pdf , viewed 29 September 2011.

Conflicting Evidence: What Is It?



What is “evidence”? What does it mean when it is “conflicting”? Succinctly put:

  • A document contains “evidence” only in terms of your research question. If your question is, “Was Charles the father of Barbara?” then Barbara’s birth certificate will contain direct evidence by naming her father. On the other hand, Barbara’s APG membership card will have little evidentiary value in answering that question.
  • Evidence is “direct” if it provides an answer to the research question. Everyone’s favorite example of this is a household group in the 1880 federal census in which relationship to the head of household is stated.
  • Evidence is “indirect” if it can be used to support an answer in a subtle way. Everyone’s favorite example of indirect evidence is a household group in the 1850 federal census. For example, if Barbara was a one-year-old youngster living in the household of Charles in 1850, we could conclude that the household structure does not preclude Barbara as a child of Charles. If they were related, this is just what we would expect to find. However, the census makes no direct statement about relationship and such a household structure could come about in other ways. We have to live with ambiguity in the 1850 census as it does not provide a direct "yes or no" answer to the research question.
  • Evidence is “conflicting” when two documents provide completely different answers to the research question.
I once had an audience member tell me that she had a situation in which the death date on the gravestone and the death date in the vital records were different. She asked me which one she should ignore. I wasn’t horrified by the question. In fact, it was familiar. In my early days as a genealogist, this was how I approached conflicting evidence. I wanted to know which date was right and which date was wrong.

After a few decades of experience, I now understand that it is a bad idea to bury conflicting evidence. If I write about an event as if that conflicting evidence doesn’t exist, then future researchers will be confused. They will find that evidence just as I did and they will doubt the depth of my research or the credibility of my conclusions as a result. Even worse, I might be wrong in my conclusion about which piece of evidence to keep. Therefore, we keep all the evidence we find. I like to make comments in footnotes about conflicting evidence and why I didn’t use it. That lets readers know my thought process and helps in the long run for all of us to come to reliable conclusions.