Genealogy is, sadly, full of mistakes, and they are oh so easy to make, and often if you look at the timeline of an ancestor's story the mistakes are obvious.
In an earlier post I listed some of the things to keep in mind to help spot obvious errors - and I have seen all of these in online trees :
- Children cannot be born before their parents.
- Children cannot be born to a mother who is 6 years old. Or 94 years old.
- Children are highly unlikely to be born to a father who is 89 years old. While this MAY be biologically possible, it is unlikely and deserves a bit of fact checking.
- A child cannot be christened 2 months before they are born.
- A woman cannot marry 3 years after she has died.
- A man cannot enlist in the army 5 years
after he has died.
The timeline shows the errors.
Recently
I discovered a transcribed record in an online database that
illustrated an impossible timeline. The record for the baptism of
Hannah May below leapt out at me
when I first located it. Why?? Check the birth and baptism dates
again. According to this record Hannah was born 17 August 1796 but
baptised 6 weeks earlier on 9 July 1796.
Something has been transcribed incorrectly in this record. Possibly the dates are transposed and Hannah was born in July and baptised in August. Possibly one of the months was transcribed incorrectly. With no original image to check, I will need to dig further to find out. It is clear, however, that a mistake has been made somewhere and has not been picked up in the transcription process. The timeline shows.
No comments:
Post a Comment