Posts in August 9, 2025

There’s confusion about negative evidence and negative findings. I see it in various postings and writings trying to differentiate the two. It can be easy to confuse them and frankly they are easy to confuse. I searched for John Ufkes in the 1870 Hancock County and Adams County, Ilinois, federal census records. I used indexes and performed a manual search. That’s a negative finding. A negative finding is when I search for someone in a record and do not find them in that record. A negative finding can change if I eventually find the person in a record–perhaps by looking for my John Ufkes in a different county I find him. In that case my negative finding no long exists. I’ve got a negative finding if I don’t […]