Author Archives: Site Admin

Provenance versus Providence

You may think divine providence caused you to obtain that picture of great-grandma or that family bible, but provenance is what we usually call the “chain of ownership” for a family relic or document.

The provenance of a family heirloom shows how it came to us. It’s important to track as much of the provenance of an item as we can in order to know what we have is really what we think it is. The provenance for item indicates we know who the previous owners were and how we came to acquire the item ourselves.

After all, is that great-grandpa’s hayhook, or did you just pick it up a farm sale?

Names Switched?

My great-aunt is buried in Idaho. She has two tombstones–one a military one and other a joint stone with her husband.

The dates of birth and death are the same–born in 1910 and died in 1990.

One has her name as Anna M. Hutchison and the other has her name as Margaret M. Hutchison.

Never hurts to change those first and middle names around when performing searches.

And the stones should be transcribed they way they are inscribed. Commentary about what is “correct” can be made elsewhere.

In One Place Only

There are still records that exist only in their original form. They have not been transcribed. They have not been microfilmed. They have not been digitized.

Local records frequently fall into this category of being available “only in the original location,” but there are others as well. While it is realized that not everyone can travel to remote places to perform research, at least be aware that there may be more material out there.

Look At The Time Frame

Always analyze a date in the context of other events taking place at about the same time. In comparing the death date of my great-grandfather with the date the will was brought to court for recording, I realized the dates were close–the date of death was 1 February and the will was brought for recording on 3 February. The time frame was even closer than I thought.

The great-grandfather died on a Saturday and on the following Monday the potential executor brought the will to be recorded. This was the first business day after the ancestor died–meaning that there wasn’t really any delay at all–the executor didn’t mess around.

Why Was The Record Created?

Do you know the original purpose of the record you are using for your research? It most likely was not genealogy. Land deeds were created to transfer real property, tax records were used to document the wealth of an individual so that taxes could be collected, court testimony was used to gather evidence to make a decision in a specific case, etc.

Why a document was created impacts the information it contains and how reliable that information may be perceived for genealogy research.