November 1, 2024
Genealogists want to make their family trees as accurate as possible. We spend hours searching through old documents in repositories and online, looking for the records that give us the answers to our questions.
Experts tell us to find more than one source for every birth, death or marriage date that we list. Remember, though, that it’s not enough to just find more than one source. We also need to analyze them and draw a conclusion concerning their validity.
For example, I might decide to verify a birth date for my hypothetical great Aunt Mary. According to family stories Mary was born on July 4,1880 in Utah. I want to find documents that prove or disprove that date. Records such as birth certificates, death certificates, baptismal records, obituaries and cemetery records immediately come to mind. If Mary were a man, I might also include military records such as draft registration cards in my search.
As I begin my search, I learn that Utah did not keep statewide birth certificates until 1905. Although some cities such as Ogden and Salt Lake City kept birth records as early as 1890, Aunt Mary’s birth is too early to have been recorded in any of them.
Church records are also a good place to find birth information. They’re usually very accurate and often were kept long before governmental records. In the United States some denominations kept better records than others, but some people didn’t belong to any church. Mary’s family was not religious, and older relatives stated that no one in the family was active in any local churches.
Mary lived her whole life in Utah and did not die until 1956. That means that she had a death certificate. Utah is a state which makes older death certificates available online. However, some states do not consider birth and death certificates public. Mary’s death certificate was easily found at the Utah State Archives website.
Obituaries for people who died in the mid twentieth century are very common. Mary died in 1956 in the town where she’d spent her entire life, so there was an informative obit for her. It included her date of birth as well as her date of death.
Mary’s family placed a large headstone on her grave which included her dates of birth and death. Records kept in the cemetery office supplied an exact birth date. Not all cemeteries keep these kinds of detailed records, but it’s always worth checking at any cemetery office.
Mary’s death certificate, obituary and cemetery records all agree that her date of birth was July 4, 1880. This seems like it is enough information to prove her birth date, but it really isn’t. On Mary’s death certificate, her daughter is listed as providing the information. If you think about it, you’ll realize that you only know your parents’ birth dates because someone told them to you. You weren’t alive at that time and don’t know for sure that the information is accurate.
That brings us to the obituary and the cemetery information. Although we don’t know for sure, it’s likely that Mary’s daughter provided the information for them too.
The moral of this example is that sometimes what looks like several sources may only be one. In Mary’s case if I wanted to be sure of her birth date, I would need to keep looking for other sources. Information on her birth supplied by someone other than her daughter would help verify the birth date.
Carol Stetser
Researcher
Larimer County Genealogical Society