Every event in your ancestor’s life takes place in context. If your ancestor does something on a specific date, there may be other people doing that same thing on that same date:
- other couples marrying on the same date as your ancestor may be relatives or close friends
- other individuals naturalizing on the same day as your ancestor may be relatives, friends, or associates
- men who deserted the army on the same date as your ancestor may have had a connection to him
- people who died on the same date as your ancestor may have had the same contagious illness
- and so on.
The commonality of the date may mean nothing. It may also be significant. Just don’t ignore it. Looking for “same day people” is an excellent way to locate your ancestor’s friends, associates, and neighbors, what Elizabeth Shown Mills (author of Evidence Explained) calls the FAN network.
Your ancestor didn’t live in a vacuum. Using the FAN approach requires some air <grin>.
2 Responses
I noticed a gggrandfather and gggrandmother died on the same day. I looked it up and that was during the Yellow Fever epidemic in Texas.
When going through my parents’ files after their deaths, I found two nearly identical high school graduation programs, one for each of the two high schools in Tacoma, WA at that time. Both graduations were held the same night, June 19, 1924. My mother graduated from Stadium HS, my dad from Lincoln HS. they didn’t meet until they were in college 2 years later.