City Directory Coverage Can Be Spotty in Many Ways

These days my genealogy life is busy and not very productive of blog posts. But this morning I re-learned a lesson already known to genealogists who are cautious or experienced or both.

We've all benefited greatly from the increased on-line presence of city directories on commercial websites. Today I was trying to track a particular couple through a few years of on-line city directories for Kansas City, Kansas.

The name I sought was not in Ancestry.com's index for 1945, 1947, 1954, 1955, and 1959 -- but when I went into the directory itself, it was there for each of those years. The error was not systematic; other family members with the same fairly distinctive surname were indexed.

Not every year is represented on Ancestry.com, and I wondered if KCK directories were not published every year, or whether the microfilming was more complete than digital coverage. It is, a little bit: the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center's microtext catalog shows that they have the 1948 KCK directory, which Ancestry.com does not have (and which I will have to check on my next visit). On the other hand, Ancestry.com has the 1961 and 1963 directories, which may or may not be on the shelves in Fort Wayne, but are not in the microfilm collection.

Of course, directories themselves are not gospel either, though sometimes they may be about as close as we can get to some facts. I remember having one person's death record I had: she was survived several years by her directory listing!

No news here, just a reminder that good genealogy standards and practices survive digitization and other novelties. You'll find this one in Genealogy Standards #13: "Wherever possible, . . . research plans follow such materials [indexes and family histories and similar items] to original records and primary information." Happy Searching Holidays!

Everyone an "expert"?

A friend reminded me to read a couple of interesting opinion posts outside the field of genealogy:

"The Death of Expertise" by Tom Nichols, and

"No, You're Not Entitled to Your Opinion," by Patrick Stokes.

Both writers are dismayed at the popular notion that any ignorant opinion is as good as a well-informed one. Neither draws much on history, but it is well to remember that the US was founded on a healthy skepticism of authority, and the ensuing presidency of Andrew Jackson intensified this American characteristic.

But like all good things mistrust of authority can be carried too far. A politician who uses her position of authority to assert without evidence that history supports her position (or that she can see Russia from her house) may indeed deserve skepticism. Someone who played a dad on TV and who now shills for a finance company deserves something stronger than skepticism.

Many of us come to genealogy thinking that we're already experts. Most of us learn that we're not, and then proceed to learn what we need to know. At least genealogy has a clear set of standards that anyone can read and understand. Those who choose not to follow them will still be judged by them.

We're not all experts, and we don't have to be. We do need the wit to seek our genealogy from those who follow standards, our business news from the Wall Street Journal, our climate science from actual climate scientists, and so forth -- not trying to make one source do for all. Common sense, right?



Harold Henderson, "Everyone an 'expert'? ," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 31 January 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

BCG revises and updates Genealogical Standards

Thirteen years ago, the best minds in genealogy, under the aegis of the Board for the Certification of Genealogists, published a manual of genealogy standards, in which they began to wean the field away from terminology like "preponderance of the evidence" borrowed from law and not specific enough for our needs.

Now some of the same best minds have revised, reorganized, updated, and published it as Genealogy Standards. The basics -- the five-part Genealogical Proof Standard -- remain the same. And the need for standards remains the same. As editor Thomas W. Jones writes, they provide "a guide to sound genealogical research and a way to assess the research outcomes that genealogists produce. They are standards for anyone who seeks to research and portray accurately people’s lives, relationships, and histories." (More from him on the changes over at Angela McGhie's blog Adventures in Genealogy Education.)

One of my favorites is Standard 39, "Information Preference":

Whenever possible, genealogists prefer to reason from information provided by consistently reliable participants, eyewitnesses, and reporters with no bias, potential for gain, or other motivation to distort, invent, omit, or otherwise report incorrect information. At the same time, genealogists understand that some preferred information items could be proved inaccurate, less desirable items might be proved accurate, or they may be the only extant relevant information items.

This is why those who seek numerically precise degrees of certainty in genealogy will always be frustrated. That kind of certainty is not available. While some sources are on average more reliable than others, there is never a guarantee. And in genealogy it's the veracity of the particular source that we're concerned about, and the best way to determine that is not to compute averages but to compare its information with that from other, independent sources. (Think of it as an elimination tournament in sports. What matters is not your or your team's past record, what matters is its performance on that occasion.)

One other important change is that we now refer to three kinds of sources (original records, derivative records, and authored works), three kinds of information (primary, secondary, and undeterminable), and three kinds of evidence (direct, indirect, and negative). These are not academic distinctions -- they make a difference in how we evaluate and use materials. But that's a story for another day.



Harold Henderson, "BCG revises and updates Genealogical Standards," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 20 December 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

On Line State Resources for Genealogy 3.0

There's an old saying, "When you're tired of London, you're tired of life." Well, when you get tired of browsing this book, you're tired of genealogy.

Earlier this month my friend and colleague Michael Hait released the third edition of his On Line State Resources for Genealogy. It's up to 1140 pages and more than 9000 resources -- hosted at a bewildering variety of web sites, with a much deeper and different reach than the popular free and subscription mega-sites.

Contrary to the title, the book includes on-line resources at the national level including the National Archives. Some sites require sign-in. "Resources" include images of original records; derivative records (such as transcriptions and abstracts); authored works; and finding aids and indexes. As stated in the introductory material, use the finding aids and indexes and derivative sources to lead to the original records when possible.

The table of contents is arranged by state and then by repository in apparently random order within each state. A click on any entry in the table of contents takes you directly to the repository's listings, and a click on the specific repository's link takes you there.

Midwestern researchers will be interested to know that Indiana listings occupy 92 pages, Illinois 61, Ohio 46, and Michigan and Wisconsin each 14.

This undertaking is nothing less than gargantuan. And it includes resources I did not know about but should have. Still it doesn't have everything: absent are La Crosse, Wisconsin, city directories; the Monroe County, Wisconsin, Local History Room; and several name indexes available at the Chicago branch of NARA.

But as the numbers mount up this enterprise faces a deeper problem -- how to organize the resources. Not only are they proliferating daily (the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center just announced eleven new ones). Often the originating agency may be different, or in a different place, than the record itself (such as county records created and listed under the name of a state agency). Equally bothersome, it is also often difficult to discern where one repository ends and another begins, since the same collection may be reached through more than one portal. It certainly helps that this book is searchable and not in print form, but part of its value is that the resources also be rationally browseable.

This compilation is itself an essential part of a "reasonably exhaustive search" as prescribed by BCG's Genealogy Standards, but other searches need to be made both within and outside of it.

Another form of browsing is to follow the compiler's new blog featuring a resource every few days.






Michael Hait, comp., On Line State Resources for Genealogy, third edition (PDF/ebook, privately printed, 2013).


Harold Henderson, "On Line State Resources for Genealogy 3.0," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 18 December 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]







Harold Henderson, "On Line State Records for Genealogy 3.0," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 18 December 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]