[Genealogy] Independence, Brick Walls, and Diacritics

[Michael John Neill]

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** Independent Creation
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** Those Were Diacritics not Wiggles
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----------------------------
Independent Creation
----------------------------


Just like there’s rarely actually three brothers who came as stowaways to
the Americas, there’s no such thing as the “three sources” rule.

There’s no magic in threes, just like there’s no magic in genealogy.

It really isn’t just about how many sources you have for a specific fact
about a person. It’s about how many independently created sources you
have. Sometimes different sources for the same piece of information
probably are not really all that different.[image: img_20161105_164440]
<https://rootdig.genealogytipoftheday.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/IMG_20161105_164440.jpg>

Let’s say that the death certificate, obituary, and tombstone all provide
the same date of birth for a relative. Does that mean I have three sources
providing that date of birth? Well technically I do. But when I stop and
think about how the date of birth came to be on that death certificate, in
that obituary, and on that tombstone, I realize that these sources are not
that independent at all. It is very likely that the same person provided
the information on all three records. Often our sources are not as
independent as we would like for them to be.

If one person didn’t provide the information to all three sources, that
date of birth may have been copied from the same original source–perhaps an
entry in a family Bible or something the deceased had written somewhere.
When a person thinks about how certain information gets in a death
certificate, in an obituary, or on a tombstone it often comes from the same
place.

In this case, I probably don’t have three truly unique sources for the date
of birth of this person.

So even if there is a “rule of three,” which there isn’t, it has not been
met.

Often different sources that provide information are not as independent as
we think they are or as we would like them to be.

Independently created sources are what we’d like to find. The reality is
that most of the time information we find is from different sources is not
created independently at all, but rather stems from one person’s memory of
an event, one person’s memory of what they’ve been told about an event, or
what that person read in a record of the event.

If Grandma is convinced she was born in 1910 in Tioga, Hancock County,
Illinois, then that’s what she’s going to put down on every record where
she is asked her age or place of birth. She gives that information
consistently, not necessarily because it is correct but because she
believes it to be true and is attempting to always answer questions based
upon what she believes is the truth.

But there may be five different sources for which Grandma directly (by
saying it herself) or indirectly (by one of her family members saying what
she had told them) provided her date and place of birth. Are those sources
really independent?

These are reasons why it’s always good to think about the sources we use,
who was the likely informant on them, and how likely they were to know the
given information. It’s possible to have several different records and one
real source.

------------------------------------
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---------------------
Those Were Diacritics Not Wiggles
---------------------

Sometimes a wiggle is just a wiggle.

Entry 101 in the image accompanying this post was discussed in an earlier
blog post, (“When Is It a Diacritic and When Is It Shorthand?”
<https://rootdig.genealogytipoftheday.com/?p=695>).

It turns out that the symbol above the first “a” in “Catharina” is not a
diacritic at all. That was how I referred to it in the initial
posting–which was incorrect. Instead it is part of the uppercase letter “C.”
<http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-1DoIAdOLdKo/VVIugGSo6rI/AAAAAAAAT0k/aENWYljNb08/s1600/diacriticornot.jpg>

A reader suggested this to me and, while I was not 100% certain, it
certainly made more sense than it being a diacritic. My original blog post
focused on the solid line above the “a” in “Ana” and the mention of the
script over the “a” in “Catharina” was more parenthetical. In hindsight, I
should not have been so quick to assume what it was.

Entries viewed in isolation are just begging to be misinterpreted.
Handwriting should be viewed in the context of other records in the same
series–hopefully in handwriting made by the same person.

To follow up on premise that the wiggle above the “a” was not a diacritic,
I looked at other renderings of an uppercase C by the same minister. The
top five entries are from the same page in the baptismal register as the
entry of initial interest. They all have the same marking over the vowel
following the initial C.

Three entries on the following page convinced me that the marking was not a
diacritic–it’s also over the “L” in Clara, and the “h” in Christine and
Charlotte. The same diacritic would not be over teh consonants as well.
Looking at samples of uppercase “C” as shown in the image from Ernest
Thode’s *German-English Genealogical Dictionary
<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0806313420/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0806313420&linkCode=as2&tag=gentipoftheda-20&linkId=UITJ6G2MLZP4WGVV>,
*made
it a little more clear that there could be a “hook” on the upper right hand
portion of an uppercase “C*.” *

<http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-BYy2KgoW22g/VVJY2xiHhJI/AAAAAAAAT00/XZfA0cWq6qA/s1600/c-s.jpg>Pastor’s
“C”‘s don’t look exactly like those in the illustration from Thode’s book,
but then again few pastors write the way they were taught in school. Record
clerks are not much better. Interpreting handwriting is more an art than a
science.

And it takes practice.

And sometimes one has to admit that there can be some wiggle room in an
interpretation.

<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0806313420/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0806313420&linkCode=as2&tag=gentipoftheda-20&linkId=N7XYJSSWLCZ5P74O>
*Thanks* to reader Nancy P. for gently pointing this out to me and getting
me in the right direction. And *thanks *to Ernest Thode for graciously
allowing me to use this image from his *German-English Genealogical
Dictionary
<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0806313420/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0806313420&linkCode=as2&tag=gentipoftheda-20&linkId=UITJ6G2MLZP4WGVV>.
*I’ve
got a copy of Thode’s book myself.

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------------------------------------
Michael John Neill
Genealogy Tip of the Day
PO Box 17, Henderson, IL 61439
http://www.genealogytipoftheday.com
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