singhals <[email protected]> wrote: > META discussion of theory -- names not needed, no lookups needed. > > All right, let's say, just for the sake of having somewhere to > start, that Absence of proof is not proof of absence. > > At what stage can one legitimately claim that absence of evidence is > proof of the absence of proof? My brain hurts. I've read that 4 times and it's not helping. > I mean, at what stage are we allowed to be reasonable about it? > How many long-shots add up to enough? More than you'd think. I traced a line of one Norwegian fellow back maybe a dozen generations (easy over there, winters are long and they're good record keepers). Why? Because he had the right name, lived in the right place, had the right wife (I thought), was on the right census, was the right age, went to the right church....slam dunk, right? Nope. He'd moved there from across the lake, when my ancestor was busy doing other things yet to be determined. So when I finally found the conflicting information and it was solid, I had to detach him from my tree. Kept the info though with a note of "not mine and here's how I know this" so someone generations from now knows I've seen him and doesn't think they've discovered something new that has already been disproven. (that line ended up getting used by someone else, I recognized a name from it in someone's query and was able to hand them a whole chunk of completed, cited, annotated tree. They were pleased.) > When you're down to begging > total strangers to let you paw through their attic just in case > their ancestor (a) kept a diary (b) knew your ancestor and (c) > mentioned your ancestor's parents in their diary -- is absence of > proof good enough to prove there's no evidence? Is 35 years of > personal searching, plus another 52 years combined efforts of two > lawyers, two professional genealogists and four other interested > family members enough to say "mama-said" is as good as it gets > proof-wise? Best Available Evidence. Technically, I don't have primary documentation for my own place and date of birth, but given that my mom was there, "momma said" is good enough in this case. If that's all that's available, enter it and note the surety of the source in the notes. Dave Hinz Dave Hinz <[email protected]>