Post by gandolf on Oct 30, 2017 15:06:04 GMT -5
To consider your comment that records need to be taken with 'a grain of salt' makes me feel as if all the time I spent transcribing records for OPC Cornwall was a waste of time as you consider some of them useless even though they were copied from the original.
I know all about human errors but I firmly believe that transcribers do their best just as Parish Clerks of old did their best with the info at hand.
I wonder why genealogy sites were set up if not to help all seekers with their families but to hear that the information should not be taken at face value and that the info should be taken with a grain of salt really beggars belief.
Jacob
To add to the earlier point - CT was not suggesting that transcribers are doing the wrong thing. Indeed, transcriptions of records need to reflect what the original record itself says, regardless of whether that record might have the right or wrong information.
The point was rather that assuming that people in the past were "always" truthful in what they recorded in official documents (or told to clerks to record) has been proven time and time again to be a false assumption.
People lie when it suits them and they think they can get away with it. And in an era prior to WWI when having and carrying personal identification was relatively rare, you could be who ever you wanted to be simply by saying so. And many people did just that. While it is harder today, it is still not impossible, and in most parts of the world you can still call yourself anything you like as long as it is not for illegal purposes. The point was that many of the surviving documents from the past that purport to record the truth about a person in reality record whatever that person wanted recorded, whether it be truthful or incorrect (either by accident or purpose).
I recently sorted out the case of a man here in Australia where every single official document relating to him from his arrival in Australia in 1911 till his death in 1940 contains lies and incorrect data. This includes details of his three marriages, the births of his five children and his death, not to mention his age on all those documents. The reason? Well, he was born and married in New Zealand before coming to Australia, and had left behind a living wife there who he had not bothered to divorce. So every one of the three marriages in Australia was bigamous. The false data including his multiple name changes.
So when the data seems to be in conflict, such as in the case being discussed in this thread, one possibility that needs to be considered is that the discrepancy may be because the person who originally supplied the data was trying to hide facts that they preferred not to make publicly known.