Resolving Conflicting Data
North Carolina? Arkansas? Alabama? In the last post, we saw that all of these had been offered as possible birthplaces for my gg-grandfather, John Wesley Bowie. I said I’d bet on Catahoula Parish, Louisiana. Why?
What does one do when confronted by multiple conflicting data? Let’s start with the fact that the researcher at [...]
Read this.
Then for the spot-on rejoinders, read Chris Dunham and Tim Agazio.
Continue reading about A Commentary on the Quality of Sources
If, as a genealogist, you believe that you can “prove” something, well, you need to be re-educated. . . .
In genealogy, we talk about evidence and data sources, and the Genealogical Proof Standard. We don’t talk enough about what is meant by “proof” or how “proof” is distinct from evidence,or about the multifaceted nature of [...]
Some Issues Concerning the Evaluation and Analysis of Evidence
We’ve been playing a genealogical version of To Tell The Truth in which Julia McDavid, born in the nineteenth century and with a daughter named Helen, has challenged us to find her on the 1880 and 1900 censuses. The problem is that [...]
Continue reading about Will the Real Julia McDavid Please Stand Up?
This week we resolved the question of whether I’d been researching “wrong Longs” as the parents of my great-grandfather, James William Long. I said that in an upcoming post we’d show how we did that.
Out here in the hinterlands, the NGS NewsMagazine arrived a couple of days ago. As usual, it’s got a [...]
