Find Your Ancestry: Solving the Given Date Dilemma
When you are doing your own research to find your ancestry you are going to run into dates that don't make sense.
It happens all the time.
You really have to take any dates given with a grain of salt.
Don't trust them and be skeptical of them until you can prove they are correct - then you can use them to verify other things.
Let me give you some actual situations with incorrect dates that I've encountered while trying to find my ancestry.
One of my ancestors simply lied about what date she was born.
She didn't want to appear 20 years younger than her husband.
She was, in fact, twenty years younger but didn't want him to back out of marrying her due to her age.
I guess at that point in time such a difference in age was a point of embarrassment in society.
You can follow their censuses and other documents and you find that the older they got, the less the difference in their ages became.
It appears that as she got older, they no longer cared about the age difference.
Immigration dates is another place where you'll find a wide variety of dates when trying to find your ancestry.
For one of my ancestors, the date of arrival to the US was anywhere from 1870 to 1880 - depending on what you were looking at.
I have a few guesses on how this could be: some were probably simple math errors; others possibly were so that he appeared to have been in the US a certain period of time so that he qualified for something.
There is also, of course, the situation where the error could have been on the part of the person who recorded it - they just wrote it down or heard it incorrectly.
The point here is that you must ALWAYS use a range of dates when you search to find your ancestry.
I always start small and make the range bigger if nothing comes up on the early searches.
Use a base year of birth with +/- one year, then +/- two years, then five years, etc.
Sometimes you just have to look at the overall document and disregard what the ages or dates are saying.
You can do this if you KNOW you have the right family simply by all the other surrounding facts.
Correct names, birth dates, birth places, occupations, children names, etc.
, can give you the data that you need to know you have the right family.
Once you narrow it down, look to see if they were living in the same place earlier and later and use that data to further verify your conclusion.
Yes, while it's true that people did make dramatic changes in their lives, they generally didn't change everything.
Unless your ancestors went into a witness protection program, or were running from the law, they typically kept some things the same.
First names, children names, birth dates, birth places, etc.
and you can use this corroborating data to know that you have the right family, even if other dates seem odd.
I hope this has been something that you can use to move along your research.
Good luck to you in your adventure of finding your ancestry.
It happens all the time.
You really have to take any dates given with a grain of salt.
Don't trust them and be skeptical of them until you can prove they are correct - then you can use them to verify other things.
Let me give you some actual situations with incorrect dates that I've encountered while trying to find my ancestry.
One of my ancestors simply lied about what date she was born.
She didn't want to appear 20 years younger than her husband.
She was, in fact, twenty years younger but didn't want him to back out of marrying her due to her age.
I guess at that point in time such a difference in age was a point of embarrassment in society.
You can follow their censuses and other documents and you find that the older they got, the less the difference in their ages became.
It appears that as she got older, they no longer cared about the age difference.
Immigration dates is another place where you'll find a wide variety of dates when trying to find your ancestry.
For one of my ancestors, the date of arrival to the US was anywhere from 1870 to 1880 - depending on what you were looking at.
I have a few guesses on how this could be: some were probably simple math errors; others possibly were so that he appeared to have been in the US a certain period of time so that he qualified for something.
There is also, of course, the situation where the error could have been on the part of the person who recorded it - they just wrote it down or heard it incorrectly.
The point here is that you must ALWAYS use a range of dates when you search to find your ancestry.
I always start small and make the range bigger if nothing comes up on the early searches.
Use a base year of birth with +/- one year, then +/- two years, then five years, etc.
Sometimes you just have to look at the overall document and disregard what the ages or dates are saying.
You can do this if you KNOW you have the right family simply by all the other surrounding facts.
Correct names, birth dates, birth places, occupations, children names, etc.
, can give you the data that you need to know you have the right family.
Once you narrow it down, look to see if they were living in the same place earlier and later and use that data to further verify your conclusion.
Yes, while it's true that people did make dramatic changes in their lives, they generally didn't change everything.
Unless your ancestors went into a witness protection program, or were running from the law, they typically kept some things the same.
First names, children names, birth dates, birth places, etc.
and you can use this corroborating data to know that you have the right family, even if other dates seem odd.
I hope this has been something that you can use to move along your research.
Good luck to you in your adventure of finding your ancestry.
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