EVERTON'S FAMILY HISTORY NEWSLINE
Tuesday, 15 February 2000
Research Tip: How Old Was The Mother?
One of the easiest ways to check the accuracy of a generational
relationships (parents to children) is to check the ages of the
people involved. Most genealogists who have been infected with the
compulsion for much time have seen an alleged pedigree in which a
mother would have been eight years old at the time a child was born.
Even stranger are the times when an alleged mother was born
after her son or daughter was born!
Since it would be impossible to bear a child before your own birth,
and very unlikely to conceive at seven years of age, these two
examples should lead you to immediately suspect that something is
wrong. In some cases you may find that the error lies in a
transcription, such as the mother's birthdate being written as 1878
when it should have been written as 1858. When you find this error by
cross-checking with the other data on the mother, it's a simple
matter to fix it and move on.
But there are at least three other possibilities. The first is that
the alleged mother is entirely mis-identified, either plucked out of
thin air, or transcribed from somewhere else in a messy file of
notes. In this case you need to throw out all of the data on this
person and start over again.
The second possibility is that the woman identified as the mother was
someone's wife -- someone with the same name as your ancestor.
Someone has confused the two, and now you have to do extended
research to determine which of the two sets of spouses with the same
name was yours.
Finally, it is possible that the woman who would have been very young
at the time of your ancestor's birth was indeed the wife of your
ancestor's father. And the stepmother of your ancestor. Childbirth
and other motherly duties aren't easy today, and they were far more
difficult in the past. It was not uncommon for a man to go through
two or more wives in his lifetime, wearing out each in turn only to
replace her with a new (and younger) mate. If you find this to be the
case on your pedigree chart, you will need to do some more researching
to learn who the first wife was. And then show the family as it was
in each stage of its existence.
Copyright 2000, Everton Publishers
All rights reserved
- ------------------------------------------------------------------
FAMILY HISTORY NEWSLINE is a free daily genealogy news service from
Everton Publishers
P.O. Box 368
Logan, UT 84323
Toll-free: 1-800-443-6325
http://www.everton.com
To subscribe, send a message to lists(a)everton.com with the
message: subscribe history
To unsubscribe, send a message to lists(a)everton.com with the
message: unsubscribe history
Recent articles are available online at
http://www.everton.com/FHN/