Food for thought from Ancestry Daily News http://www.ancestry.com/dailynews ============================================================ "MISINTERPRETATIONS, or WHAT'S UP WITH THAT?" by Juliana Smith ============================================================ Kids seem especially prone to misinterpretations. Most of us have seen a child singing along to a song with his or her own interpretation of the lyrics. I remember both my nephew and my daughter singing along to the "Jungle Book" song "Bare Necessities." They both thought the song said " . . . forget about your worries and your stripes." They probably would have never thought of " . . . forget about your worries and your strife," because they probably weren't familiar with the word "strife." As adults, we often still make the same mistakes. I still struggle with song lyrics and ask my husband, "What'd he say?" Or I just make up my own. (Sometimes they're better that way.) I know I'm not alone. There's even a Web site set up for people to post their favorite lyrical misinterpretations (http://www.kissthisguy.com), and there are quite a few out there. We may find ourselves making these same types of mistakes in our family history research, too. How often have we come across something we didn't quite understand or know the meaning of and insert our own interpretation because it seemed to work. By inserting our own interpretations we may be leading our research astray. It's also possible that someone else's misinterpretations have been inserted into a record. Let's take a look at some common mistakes that can lead us down the wrong path. IN THE CREATION OF RECORDS This is one you have probably heard about many times before. Picture the census taker of arriving at the home of a newly immigrated family from Ireland. With a lovely Irish brogue, the head of the household proudly answers all of the questions, as the census taker, himself of Russian descent, struggles to understand just what he is saying. Early in the morning, this enumerator may be energetic and a little more particular about the way he records the entries, but as the day wears on and he trudges from house to house, meeting with a multitude of accents, he may become a little less attentive to detail. The same can be said of the "contributing authors" of the documents we use to fill in our family histories. In researching an ancestress with a maiden name of Dwyer, I found entries for her in a compilation of baptismal records listed as Dwyer, Ware, Toire, Wire, and Weir--and these were all listings from the same parish. I can just see the priest (or priests) as he tried to record the data each time she came in to have her child baptized, scratching his head and wondering, "What'd she say?" TWISTED GRAPEVINES Family stories are notorious for misinterpretations. These tales are passed from generation to generation "through the grapevine." Similar to the grapevine growing on the side of my house, the stories may start small. You can see where it started and follow its growth up the side of the house or trellis. But as time passes it grows and turns into this tangled and twisted mass of vines and leaves with seemingly no beginning and no end. It takes a lot of work (and basically a machete!) to try to find the base of the vine. Your best bet is to go to the root and follow it from there, weeding away all of the extraneous branches that lead off to nowhere. Sometimes it helps to do a little historical digging around the family tale in question. My Aunt Ethel, who has an amazing record for being correct with the information she provided my mother, told us that the father of my great-great-grandfather came over with Lafayette from France to fight in the Revolution. But a little history lesson and some easy math pretty much disprove this tale. After looking at the dates in a historic context, we can estimate that if he came over with Lafayette as a young man in the 1770s, it would have made him somewhere in the vicinity of 80 years old by the time my great-great-grandfather was born. I have a feeling Aunt Ethel is wrong on this one. Who knows, maybe down the line we'll find someone else with a connection to Lafayette, but for now this family tale will have to stay on the back burner. ABBREVIATIONS The records we use are often rife with abbreviations. As we interpret these records, the meanings of the abbreviations may seem obvious, but often the abbreviations can be deceptive. For example, you locate a record that gives Mauckport, Ia. as the place of origin for one of your ancestors. Eureka! Yippee! WhooHoo! You have just located Great-great-grandpa Jones' place of origin in the mid-19th century! You're doing the "genealogists' happy dance!" But wait, a search for information on Mauckport, Iowa turns up nothing. You turn to old maps. Nothing. What's up with that? What was a great lead is turning into another dead end. But wait, a little research on the abbreviation, Ia. tells you that Ia. can be either (1) Iowa or (2) old abbreviation for Indiana. ("Abbreviations and Acronyms for the Family Historian," by Kip Sperry). Aha! Quite a big difference if you are looking for great-grandpa Jones' records! POOR PENMANSHIP I saw a post a while back on a list, where a woman was complaining rather vehemently about the censuses being so hard to read. She thought it would be much better if someone typed them all out for her. While no one loves a census enumerator with sloppy handwriting, I don't want someone else trying to interpret the entries of my family and their neighbors for me. Chances are they will not be familiar with my family names. They will not be familiar with the neighborhood and be able to spot familiar names like I could. I would much rather see the actual entries for myself and be able to judge for myself what the enumerator was trying to get across. One of the best tricks for reading sloppy handwriting, is to look at other examples that are clearer and compare the letters and the way they were formed. Try duplicating the writing yourself. As you go through the motions that he did, you may find it easier to decipher the entry. TRICKS OUR MIND CAN PLAY If it's not bad enough with all the problems that faulty records cause for us, sometimes our own minds can play tricks on us. That date you are extracting from a burial record, is it the date of death or the burial date? Is that a birth date or baptism date? Are your forming assumptions about your ancestors as far as their ethnicity, religion, relationships, etc.? Sometimes it helps if we list, "just the facts, ma'am." My favorite way to do this is with a timeline. Long time readers have heard this from me many times, but it really works. You don't need any fancy formats or software--I typically just use word processing software or a spreadsheet. You can even do it using index cards. Just gather all your data on the individual or family in question and start listing events in chronological order. I always include the corroborating sources for each event so that if I happen to run into something that doesn't quite fit, I can analyze the sources I used and try to determine what is correct. An example of a timeline I created for one of my ancestors is online at: http://www.ancestry.com/library/view/news/articles/553.asp SO WHAT CAN WE DO? If we seem to be at a dead end, maybe it is time to go back and reevaluate all the evidence. We can make sure we are looking at original records, not someone else's interpretation of them. A better understanding of why the records were created and a little history of the times can shed some light on the problems we encounter. We can look for those flags that will tip us off that something is wrong with our (or someone else's) interpretation of the facts. So how do we know if we are falling victim to a misinterpretation? Using our "Jungle Book" example, " . . . forget about your worries and your stripes," Baloo the bear didn't have stripes. The boy, Mowgli didn't have stripes. So why were they singing about stripes? Bottom line--if you have to ask "What's up with that?" maybe it's time for a closer look. ____________________________________________________________________ Juliana Smith is the editor of the "Ancestry Daily News" and author of "The Ancestry Family Historian's Address Book." She has written for "Ancestry" Magazine and "Genealogical Computing." Juliana can be reached by e-mail at: mailto:editor@ancestry-inc.com, but regrets that she is unable to assist with personal research. An archive of her Monday columns, "The Family History Compass," are available on the Ancestry.com site at: http://www.ancestry.com/library/view/columns/compass/d_p_1_archive.asp