To be honest, this is a bit of a muddle if you compare UK practice to US practice and it's only a guide anyway, but.... On 21 December 2015 at 23:12, D C Banks via < family-historian-users@rootsweb.com> wrote: > ... It is the document or 'source' of the information that is primary, > secondary etc., not the content. ... > I beg to differ totally. Primary and Secondary have always (rash statement that, since it's not true for David!) been in the context of whether the information (i.e. content) is primary or secondary relative to the event or attribute that it is providing the evidence for. Thus a Death Certificate provides primary evidence for the date of death (under all normal circumstances) but only secondary evidence (usually indirect, secondary evidence at that) for the date of birth (under all normal circumstances). (A death close to birth could be argued to be a different case). Whether the whole source document is original or a copy is not what primary / secondary is about (though it might feed into it) - instead the Americans would classify their source documents as original or derivative (i.e. some sort of a copy / extract / summary, etc.), which helps decide the potential for errors. The muddle, I believe, between Americans and us over primary and secondary, comes over whether the passage of time makes a difference or not. I have seen it said that a 90y old mother recalling the birth of her child is still counted as primary evidence for the birth - and the writer immediately admitted that would need to be considered carefully in case of memory problems. And that really is the point - primary and secondary are **just a step** along the way to answering the question - can we trust this data? I have a birth certificate for my GF that gives primary evidence for his date of birth. But the consensus from his baptism a couple of years later on (which recorded his birth date) and my Mum's stories, is that his parents adjusted his DoB to be within the legal reporting limit and so the primary evidence is (in my view) wrong and the secondary evidence (in my view) right. So, frankly, I can't get too excited over whether it's primary or secondary evidence..... Adrian