Interestingly false information -- a research travelogue

A certain kind of information can come in handy when genealogy gets complicated. It might be primary, secondary, or undeterminable; for this purpose it doesn't much matter. Whichever way, the information is false on its face, but when viewed in context with other information it points to a truth.

In 1916, Levinna (Reynolds) Holmes swore that she had been born in Ripley County, Ohio, 3 May 1831. (Oh yes, this is a Dark Age problem.)

She was wrong. There is no such county. There is, however, a Ripley County in Indiana. It's not far from the river and state called Ohio, and just north of Jefferson County, Indiana, where Levinna was living in 1850.

I had found her father William there in 1850 (when he was employed as a blacksmith), and in Brown County, Ohio, in 1830. But the 1840 census just did not give enough information to sort through the multiple William Reynolds in two or three states.

Now her false information prompted me to look for William in Ripley County, Indiana. Bonanza! I found two of him! Wait, that's not so good. The two Williams were both in their 30s, had apparent wives of the same age, had two apparent sons, and one apparent daughter of the right age to be Levinna. How to tell them apart?

Every entry in the 1840 census stretches across two wide pages. We rarely look at the second page. (We can't even download it from Ancestry.com because it's not indexed). Among other things it gives the number of people in each household who were involved in what were seen as the seven principal economic activities: mining; agriculture; commerce; manufacturers and trades; navigation of the ocean; navigation of canals, lakes, and rivers; and learned professions and engineers.

On one William's page, every household had someone in agriculture, nothing more.

On the second William's page, a small portion of which is shown above, every household but one was the same. The one exception was the sixth line down. William's five-person household was reported to contain one person in "manufacturers and trades." Sounds like a blacksmith to me!

Obviously the work is not done. But pending further confirmation, this and other information makes me pretty sure he's my man. And I wouldn't have made it this far if his daughter had just said "Ohio."

A similar piece of interestingly false information played a role in my June NGSQ article, "Jethro Potter's Secret" (p.111).

In both cases, what makes the misinformation useful is knowing enough about the people and localities involved to recognize two things:

(a) the information is false as stated, but

(b) when its errors are unwound it can be useful anyhow.

As a rule, the more we know, the more we can find out. This is just one more reason that it's worthwhile to look back over information collected over a period of years to find some hitherto unrecognizable diamonds in the rough.

Has IFI helped you in a genealogical quest? Have you published the results yet?






Harold Henderson, "Jethro Potter's Secret: Confusion to Conclusion in Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, and Michigan," National Genealogical Society Quarterly 101 (June 2013):103-112. 
 

1840 US Census, Ripley County, Indiana, Otter Creek, p. 121, line 6, Wm. Reynolds; digital image, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com : viewed 28 September 2013), citing NARA microfilm publication M704, roll 92. The other William Reynolds is at p. 85, line 20.

Harold Henderson, "Interestingly false information -- a research travelogue," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 1 October 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Jethro Potter's secret in NGSQ

When a grown man gives his mother three different names over more than half a century, you know you've got trouble. That evidence was the beginning of my article just published in the new June 2013 National Genealogical Society Quarterly.

When Jethro Potter died at the age of 94 in Ohio in 1963, he reportedly had more than two dozen grandchildren. But his parentage was cloaked in mystery and possibly deception. The article identifies his parents by tracing a plausible mother's life forward, a lengthy process that eventually led to five key documents, all of them created decades after Jethro's birth, and only one directly naming the parents. In the course of the research eight Alberson half-siblings and two McCroskey half-siblings were identified.

This all-Midwestern story has many colorful subplots and stories, most of which were not relevant to establishing the genealogical framework. The scene shifted among multiple counties in four states: Ohio (Darke, Portage), Indiana (Randolph, Wells, Jay, Marshall, Starke), Illinois (La Salle, Livingston), and Michigan (Muskegon).

As for records, I did not find or use anything exotic. In the end the 66 footnotes contained standard genealogical fare: census, vital, Social Security, military, court, newspaper, probate, property, cemetery, and funeral home. Many records contained mistakes and omissions requiring the records to be analyzed and correlated and corrected.

This article grew out of two client reports that first grew into a case study for BCG certification. (It is much more condensed and focused than the case study.) Those who are working on credentialing of any sort should keep NGSQ and similar publications in mind if you want your work to last, and especially if you want it to get a really thorough going-over!




Harold Henderson, "Jethro Potter's Secret: Confusion to Conclusion in Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, and Michigan," National Genealogical Society Quarterly 101 (June 2013):103-112.


Harold Henderson, "Jethro Potter's secret in NGSQ," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 24 July 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]