A View from Kew

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A VIEW FROM CENTRE

28/8/07

12:30

Page 22

How to hunt your man Not all documented “facts” are correct. David Annal suggests ways of sifting errors and lies to find the truth

Shropshire Star

I

’ve often discussed in this column the need for family historians to adopt an open and questioning mind when dealing with their ancestors and the clues they’ve left behind in various documents. The challenge is to work out which of the “facts” about their lives are true and which are not. This is, of course, easier said than done. The untruths we come up against comprise a wide range of eventualities. As well as honest errors, there’s a whole host of mistranscriptions to deal with (both contemporary and modern). Then there are the misunderstandings and misinterpretations. Lastly, and perhaps everyone’s favourite, the downright lies. So how do we spot the mistakes, the lies and the half-truths? How do we separate the wheat from the chaff? We base our searches on what we already know about our ancestors – a combination of the details we’ve garnered from previous searches and information passed down to us by our relatives – and we tend to use a fairly limited number of “facts” to structure our search. Or at least we do if we’re researching properly; I hope that the principle of “less is more” is firmly ingrained in the minds of regular readers of this column when it comes to interrogating family history databases.

Ludlow Castle, photographed in the early 20th century.

As long as the facts we’re using are accurately recorded – or rather, recorded as we’re expecting them to be – we should, in theory, be able to find the people we’re looking for fairly easily. But as we know, it’s not always that simple – the facts often don’t match, and our searches fail. Let’s consider a typical search for a birth certificate. Our starting point is Alfred Henry Genner’s marriage certificate, on which he is said to be 22 (in February 1909) and his father is named as Richard Genner, a publican. The obvious next step would be to look for Alfred in the 1901 census; but

...places of birth given in censuses can cause all sorts of difficulties. 22 • ANCESTORS OCTOBER 2007

all we know is that he should be aged around 14 and that his father was called Richard. His father’s occupation may also help us, and it’s possible that the family will be living somewhere in Yorkshire (where Alfred married) but it’s not a lot to go on. And if just one of these “facts” from the marriage certificate is inaccurate, or if any of the facts we’re trying to match with the census has been recorded wrongly, mistranscribed or any of the other possibilities outlined above, then we’re going to struggle to find our man. I wrote last month about the complications surrounding our ancestors’ names, so this time I want to concentrate on other factors that affect our ability to find them. Ages can present us with a number of significant challenges. In Alfred’s case, all we know is that he said he


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