Sometimes we have to conjecture about a relative in order to move our research forward or at least get ideas of what other records could help us. Be careful with whom you share that conjecture as sometimes speculation suddenly becomes a “fact” for which you become the source. Sometimes it just becomes a fact with nary an indication of the origins of said fact. If you include speculation in your research notes, clearly  label that speculation as speculation.

Otherwise you may inadvertently convert your own speculation to fact.

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  1. Hello Michael. Want a story related to speculation? Our Dad was married to his first wife, and they were living in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii at the time of the bombing by the Japanese on 12/7/1941. He has told this story to us several times, and his resume says he was assigned to the USS Shaw at the time, so we have documentation. He told us he was home mowing the lawn that Sunday morning, looking up at those “funny-looking planes” flying overhead on the way to bomb his ship and many other ships and airfields on that date. My sister says she remembers Dad saying they lived on Ford Island at the time, but no one else remembers that. In my research, if he was on Ford Island he would have been right in the middle of the bombing, very close to many battleships being hit, very large explosions with their magazines being hit, and many sunk right there. I remember our Dad saying nothing about being close to the explosions and the danger other than he was “home mowing the lawn that Sunday morning, looking at the funny-looking plans flying overhead”. I just recently found in my Dad’s papers a driver’s license issued to his first wife on 11/24/1941 at an address easily found on Google Maps, and it is a few miles away from the Navy base, just north of Diamond Head in a residential area with a home which still stands which could have been there in 1941. My brother was just there on vacation, and he took a photo of the home but he did not want to knock on the door and tell our story and ask when the home was built. So, anyway, I stand firm with this document showing their address a few miles away from the bombing with the date just 13 days before the bombing. In my judgment as the family genealogist, I declare it so. Now, how do we stop arguing about this?

    • My older brother also was on Ohau on 12/7/1941 when Pearl Harbor was under attack. He and a buddy were in town when the bombs started falling getting some supplies for their ship- sorry I’ve forgotten its name which ran off and left them getting out of the harbor. It was 3 months later before they got back on their ship.

      They crawled under a culvert to try to get away from the bombing and he later came home safe from the war.

      He told me several of his war stories.

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