Knowing who provided information on a record helps us to determine the perceived reliability fo that information. But determining who the informant really was can sometimes be difficult.
Aside from the 1940 US census, no informant is listed on any US census record. Did the head of household provide the information? Did their spouse? Did an older child provide it? Was it all provided by the same person? It can be impossible to tell.
Even if an informant is listed on a death certiticate, they may not have provided each detail themselves and some death certificates have multiple informants (the doctor, the mortician, and a relative/friend/neighbor/etc.). Early death certificates may only list the doctor as the informant and one has to surmise who really provided the non-death information on the certificate.
Affidavits, legal statements, and testimonies given are usually more clear in terms of who the informant is.
It is not always possible to determine the informant on a record and when you do, then the additional work begins: determining how reliable their knowledge was.
2 Responses
It’s not just in records but also in texts that an informant can give erroneous infotmatuon. My favorite example is my family member who became interested in genealogy & published a large county history in the early nineteenth century. In it he wrote that his grandfather was born in Tennessee. Now people were born im Tennessee in that time oeriod, but one thing is quite sure, if this man, my 4x great-grandfather, was born in Tennessee, his mother would have had to be there at the time. At only age 10, the man who wrote about his grandfather’s birth had lost his own father to death, & his father was the youngest person in his family so it’s unclear if he knew any older aunts or uncles as a child. It is likely that he asked his mother who was married into the family, not born into it & she had ten children to provide & care for as well as the turmoil of the Civil War. With the advent of computers & the changes they have brought to the study of family history, we now know that my 4x great-grandfather was not born in Tennessee but arrived there from Ireland sometime around 1790. I think it is likely that women may be able to give details about people in their own families, but they may not be as reliable sources for information about the families they were married into. In my own case, my mother has given some totally incorrect information about people in my father’s family to my nieces. I’m sure that wasn’t intentional; she just didn’t know as much about his people as she would have about hers.
Even when a child of the deceased gives information about a parent, it may not be correct.
An uncle of mine gave the wrong place of birth for his dad, my granddad.
I’ve also seen records giving the wrong birth date and the wrong maiden name for a parent’s mother.
Actually, the only reliable information on a death certificate is what was provided by the doctor. Every thing else is second hand and liable to have mistakes.