Fall 2015 talks

In between the sloth of summer and the hibernation of winter are the seasons where it's actually fun to get things done. This fall I have five speaking engagements coming up.

Tuesday evening September 8, La Porte County Genealogical Society, La Porte, Indiana:
"Probate Will Not Be the Death of You" (digest version).

Saturday September 19, Willard Library, Evansville, Indiana:
"Why We Don't Write and How We Can"
"Indirect Evidence: When Perry Mason Isn't on Your Side"
"Probate Will Not Be the Death of You"
" 'Are We There Yet?' Proof and the Genealogy Police," a case study

Saturday October 17, Northwest Indiana Genealogical Society, Valparaiso, Indiana:
"Land and Property: The Records No Genealogist Can Do Without"

Tuesday evening October 20, Marshall County Genealogical Society, Plymouth, Indiana:
"Ten Commandments for Being a Good Genealogy Client"

Tuesday evening November 17, Board for Certification of Genealogists public online webinar:
"Do You Have the Reflexes You Need to Become Certified? Fifteen Things Your Grandfather Would Tell You . . . If I Were Your Grandfather"

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Is the story everything in genealogy?

Is it true that in genealogy the story is everything?

Yes -- in a way, up to a point.

I totally believe in stories, especially since they were at the core of my previous (journalistic) life. But loving and seeking family stories is not a good excuse to evade research and proof, or to disregard standards. Two thoughts:

(1) The story is not much good if it's attached to the wrong person or the wrong family. My grandfather thought that his maternal grandfather had watched and waited for a tax sale and bought a nice farm at a good price that way. I've never found any evidence that this happened (although I'm not done looking), but I have found evidence that his paternal great-grandfather did just that, probably more than once.

(2) Often hard-core research in property and probate and more obscure records can reveal stories no one remembers today. I found one while working on a case study for my BCG certification portfolio. I was struggling to trace a family headed by an agricultural laborer who owned no land. I thought they were in Marshall County, Indiana, and I worked all the records I could find and found only three traces there: a census entry, an entry in a book of chattel mortgages, and a brief court record. He had to borrow $90, and to secure the loan he put up "one dark brown medium sized horse, having small head and small ears, and supposed to be eight years old in the spring of 1881. Name of said horse is Frank." The court record came when he couldn't repay the loan and had to forfeit Frank, as well as a set of work harnesses and a wagon. (The story didn't contribute to the solving of that case, but it's burned into my memory even though I'm no relation to that family.)

Standards don't require anyone to suppress stories that are dubious or even proven false. Just be clear about what they are and are not. In fact it may be useful to preserve them. Sometimes a false story or a false piece of information conveys a nugget of truth either in the way it is told, or the kind of mistake it makes, or when it is correlated with documentary evidence. But that's a story for another day . . .


Harold Henderson, "Is the story everything in genealogy? ," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 20 January 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Is there a finite amount of genealogical evidence?

Tony Proctor has a thoughtful post over at Parallax View, discussing the concept of "proof" and how it differs in science and in genealogy. I encourage you to read the whole thing as he has a lot to say. Since thoughtful theoretical discussions are scarce in genealogy, I thought I'd add three thoughts.

(1) I'm surprised that neither the post nor the comments allude to the Genealogical Proof Standard (GPS) or the recent book that explains it most thoroughly, Thomas W. Jones's Mastering Genealogical Proof.

FYI if you're new: the GPS is the only widely accepted standard of proof in genealogy, and it states that no conclusion is proved without five things: thorough research, good citations, analysis and correlation of evidence, resolving any contradictions, and a written account. The best genealogists then working put this GPS together at the end of the 20th century under the auspices of the Board for the Certification of Genealogists (BCG_, as an improvement for our purposes on the "preponderance of the evidence" standard borrowed from the law.

(2) Tony writes,

"Science is about the here-and-now whereas genealogy is about the been-and-gone. What this means is that genealogy only has a finite set of evidence available, and although more of that set may be discovered over time, no evidence outside of that set will ever be found. It also means that evidence cannot be created on demand in order to solve a particular problem, or to support/refute a given proposition. On the other hand, in science — technology permitting — an experiment can be conceived purposely to test a given theory, or to separate two competing theories. . . . Whereas science can usually conduct a specific experiment to disprove some of the candidate theories, and so support the remainder, genealogy can only search for more items of evidence that already exist. If they don’t exist somewhere now then they never will in the future either."

Some sciences, such as paleontology, are about the been-and-gone. I suppose that in the abstract both genealogy and paleontology only have "a finite set of evidence available," but in practice nobody knows all of it or even where it is. Both paleontologists and genealogists find new evidence all the time.

It's true that paleontologists and genealogists cannot conduct laboratory experiments on the past. But they do have the ability to make predictions based on what they know, and then see whether further research supports those predictions. These predictions and tests are quite similar to an experiment. If I find that a man's wife is named in a deed where he sells property, I can predict that there is likely to be some additional evidence of the marriage that I have not yet seen (whether a formal record of the event or an appearance in an obituary), and go look for it.

But I have a quarrel with the whole idea of a "finite" amount of evidence anyway. Evidence is information that can be used to answer a specific question. (That is the agreed genealogical definition.) Sometimes ingenious genealogists find evidence where others might not have perceived any at all.

In a recent NGSQ article by Judy G. Russell, she used records of people working on roads to ascertain when someone died (who had never worked on the roads). Many genealogists would not have thought of using that information as evidence to answer the question "When did Mrs. X die?"

I'm inclined to think that even if the amount of genealogical information is finite, the amount of evidence is not, because it depends on human ingenuity in the use of the information -- much as scientists use ingenuity to design experiments. (Improved indexes can also make information much more available to be used as evidence, as in this example from a few days ago.)

(3) IMO, it's useful to figure out just what constitutes "proof" or "evidence" in different disciplines. I don't think it's useful to fuss about whether one discipline can use the word in a different sense than another discipline, because that's just not going to change. It's not that hard to understand that new evidence can supersede a past proof in genealogy as in science, and that that kind of thing does not happen in mathematics.


(Happy New Year! By Blogger's count, this is MWM blog post #1300.)



Judy G. Russell, “'Don't Stop There!,” National Genealogical Society Quarterly 99(1):37, March 2011.

Harold Henderson, "Is there a finite amount of genealogical evidence?," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 1 January 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Proving conclusions in genealogy

"Proving something in genealogy doesn't mean that we're really really, really sure. It means that we can convince our fellow genealogists and relatives that it is true."

How can we tell whether we're convincing? Ten questions to ask yourself in my article just published a Archives.com. 



Harold Henderson, "Did I Prove It? Ten Questions To Ask Along the Way," Archives.com (http://www.archives.com/experts/henderson-harold/prove-genealogy.html : viewed 24 July 2013).



Harold Henderson, "Proving conclusions in genealogy," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 25 July 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Some Dimwit Is Going To Read My Notes!

How to keep track of your research findings so that even you can find them and figure them out in a month or a year -- that's the subject of my new article over at Archives.com, "Keeping Track on the Road to Proof." The shortest possible version: we have to take detailed notes on everything we do because "even if real life never interrupts, genealogy is still a recursive process because it is a learning process: it always involves retracing our steps."




Harold Henderson, "Some Dimwit Is Going To Read My Notes!," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 23 February 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Top Five MWM Posts for July 2012

Time for the monthly popularity contest, listing the most-viewed blog posts made during July. #1 was well in the lead. I'll report on August in early October when the dust of that month will have settled.

1. Get a GRIP and Go Read Another Blog! (July 24)

2. How Can I Prove My Mom? (July 26)

3. STOP Creating Former Ancestors! (July 15)

4. Weekend Wonderings: Taking Notes (July 14)

5. Be Kind to the Newbies (July 12)


Least viewed:

Local, the quarterly (maybe) (July 22)



Harold Henderson, "Top Five MWM Posts for July 2012," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 3 September 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

How Can I Prove My Mom?

Does genealogy enable you to prove who your parents were (let alone anyone else's)? Well, to coin a phrase, it depends.

(1) "Proof" in genealogy is not like "proof" in mathematics. If I had the power to re-boot genealogy from the beginning, I would abolish the word altogether and use something else, but we are stuck with it and its misleading connotations. In math, you can prove that in a right triangle the square of the hypotenuse equals the sum of the squares of the two other sides, and it will stay proved. In genealogy proof means, roughly, that you've looked at the relevant evidence, it all agrees (and what doesn't agree can be cogently explained away), and you've written a well-cited well-reasoned argument for your conclusion. (The more precise and thorough official version is here.) But even when you've done all that, there is no way to "prove" that some new piece of evidence will never come along and change your conclusion; that possibility always exists. (And, yes, this applies to DNA evidence too. DNA is a new and valuable tool, but it does not change genealogy into mathematics.)

(2) In real life there is biological parentage and there is social parentage. DNA speaks directly to the issue of biological parentage; other genealogical records document social parentage and usually presume (for instance) that the social children of a married couple are their biological children as well. The most marvelous manifestations of this assumption are Civil War widow's pension records, which routinely include affidavits from midwives attesting that they were present for the birth of little Johnny, and that the claiming widow was indeed his mother. (As if the midwife watched little Johnny from that day to this to see he wasn't switched!) This was an extreme attempt to get biological and social parentage to match up. They don't always, and we have to be alert to obvious and less-than-obvious clues when they don't.

Genealogy has roots in the efforts of royalty to make sure the biologically correct heir took over the crown, and later in the efforts of economic royalty to make sure the biologically correct heir took over the property or the company. This can place today's adoptees, foster children, and others in an anomalous position -- often causing them to dismiss genealogy and lineage societies altogether, or to stay in the fold and become vigorous dissenters from the "tradition" by which biological children take precedence. I can't settle this argument, but a little modesty about how well we can prove biological connectedness is surely in order.

If it's all about who we are, then nature and nurture both play a part. If the same people provided both, OK. If one set of people provided the nature and another set provided the nurture, then from a historical and personal point of view they are both important and both should be traced. (In my opinion those lineage societies who disallow adoptees have some 'splainin' to do.) We can't change the past, but we can deal with it.



Harold Henderson, "How Can I Prove My Mom?," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 26 July 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

The fast-moving world of dead people

You do already know that one of the many aspects of Elizabeth Shown Mills's on-line presence is a series of QuickLessons at Evidence Explained. Right?

QuickLesson #8, "What Constitutes Proof?" is a careful eleven-step account of how you get from zero to a conclusion in a genealogically sound manner, based not on a single document but on an argument involving a body of evidence drawn from numerous documents. (Read the real thing.)

The other day I ran into someone who claimed to like QL #8. Having praised it, the commenter proceeded to disagree with its main point. He thought that there should be a twelfth step in which the researcher crowns the case by producing a document containing definitive proof. Otherwise it just didn't feel "proved" to him. (I may be doing him an injustice, but I can't check as his comment has since disappeared from that particular forum. I bring it up here because I know many people feel this way whether they choose to say so in public or not.)

The idea dies very hard that proof is out there and all we have to do is find the key document that tells us the unquestionable unvarnished truth. I suspect that this misconception helped draw many of us to this field in the first place -- a sense that in genealogy (unlike, say, history) we could find "real proof" of past facts, some solid ground that would not change with new evidence or interpretations. Well, good-bye to that. Like any other legitimate discipline, genealogy requires multiple independent sources, preferably original -- and when they differ, as they often do, then evaluating and analyzing each, correlating them together, and writing it all up in a convincing argument. And results can and do change with new information and new insights. Elizabeth says it shorter: "History offers no certainties. All it offers are relics."

These are not things we expected when we started out. They take some getting used to. I have written elsewhere (in NGS Magazine last year) about the need for genealogists to accept ambiguity and uncertainty in the process of research as well. Not so very long ago we could expect that we could do genealogy more or less forever without having to learn about genetics and DNA. Or that we would never be long away from the smell of old paper and rotting leather.
My daughter-in-law says it shorter, too: "Welcome to the fast-moving world of dead people."

What other things did you (consciously or otherwise) expect from genealogy that have turned out not to be the case? Is the reality better than the expectation? (I would say, yes. YMMV.)



Elizabeth Shown Mills, “QuickLesson 8: What Constitutes Proof?” Evidence Explained: Historical Analysis, Citation & Source Usage (http://www.evidenceexplained.com/content/quicklesson-8-what-constitutes-proof: 20 June 2012).


Harold Henderson, "The fast-moving world of dead people," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 20 June 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]