ROOTS & BRANCHES

In the “Roots & Branches” column published last week, we talked about how we are nearly always left with more questions than answers when we do genealogy.

Some wags might say that family historians are never satisfied—the more they know, the more they want to know.

Well, that’s fine in and of itself … and I’m not going to be the one to suggest that genealogists should be less inquisitive and interrogating of their ancestral experiences.

Some years ago, the Board for Certification of Genealogists came up with a five-step process called the “Genealogical Proof Standard” as a way to judge evidence of family connections:

• Reasonably exhaustive research has been conducted.
• Each statement of fact has a complete and accurate source citation.
• The evidence is reliable and has been skillfully correlated and interpreted.
• Any contradictory evidence has been resolved.
• The conclusion has been soundly reasoned and coherently written

It’s that last step I think is important to highlight: You have to “show your work” in the form of a written conclusion.

Now I realize that some people like to write more than others (One thing I tell people who are not writers is “give me the bullet points”—that’s a way of starting the writing process less painfully). But this part of genealogical proof isn’t optional if you want a conclusion to be respected.

It’s also important to point out that while working to this standard should fill in much of the “half” the story you don’t know, it does not give you 100% certainty.

Note that some parts of the standard are inevitably subjective. What’s “reasonably exhaustive”? How can we be sure “evidence is reliable”? And who’s judging the “soundness” and “coherence” of the reasoning and writing?

It’s also work thinking about how people (I’ll put this gently) “interpret” their experiences, perhaps to put themselves in a better light than others might think is proper.

And that’s not a modern phenomenon. It’s not just in narratives about wars that “history is written by the winners.”

I often talk about time and place being the “crosshairs of genealogy”—that is, where the time era you’re researching and the place in which it takes place intersect to determine what types of records are available.

There’s likely another set of “crosshairs” that can be valuable to researchers: This would be where records about an individual intersect with the context in which they resided to help determine the answers to those all-important “why” questions (For example, many people left the German states in the 1800s to avoid military drafts but if you say this is a reason for your 1700s immigrant leaving, that’s not accurate being their were no drafts in that time period).

When it’s all said and done, there always will be room for more research. That’s probably why anyone who says they’ve “finished” their genealogy is the subject of derisive laughter.

Who’s ever done?