TIP #460 - OH, MERCY ME! This tip will be sort of a review of one I posted a long time ago but it's a problem that just won't go away! What do we do when we keep running into conflicting data? Sometimes it's almost better not to have the information than to have several pieces of conflicting information it seems. We've worked so hard to find Aunt Susie or Uncle Sanford, and now that we've found him or her, who or what do I believe? I'll pose below a scenario that many of us have faced, it is not exaggerated. Uncle Sanford Smaltz's great-great granddaughter swears that her family told her that Uncle Sanford was born in England and came to the United States in 1750, settling in Virginia, coming over with his three brothers, no wives. After spending years working the records of Virginia, and finding nothing, someone sends you an email and says that they found your Uncle Sanford on a passenger list from Wales in 1748, with a wife Elizabeth and five children - Zelda, Zelma, Zero, Zenith and Zookeeper. Then, if that's not enough to blow your pedigree into smithereens, you find his Bible record! Someone had preserved this Bible for hundreds of years and it was found in a yard sale in California. The contributor copies each page faithfully and you pace back and forth by the mailbox waiting. Eureka! It says here that ...... Uncle Sanford was what? Born in Switzerland? Stowed away on a boat in 1760, was indentured to another man in Connecticut? Married Patience Peculiar and had no children. Now what? Let's jump forward a few generations to the late 1800's. Aunt Susie, she'll be easy to track, let Uncle Sanford "rest in peace" awhile. Susie - she was a character we've heard. Wore flamboyant clothes, had courters all over the neighborhood, but died a spinster, guess she couldn't make up her mind? The family said the funeral was the talk of the town - mourners everywhere (mostly male I assume!). They said she was buried in the city cemetery with a beautiful, tall monument and that flowers were placed at her grave every day. Boy, this should be a snap! Being a little closer in time and after a lot of digging, you actually found her obituary! It was one of those flowery ones of the era, going on paragraph after paragraph extolling her virtues. But wait! What's this? Now this HAS to be Aunt Susie but said she was buried by the side of her loving husband, and there is a list of thirteen children who survive her? And the cemetery - why it isn't the fancy city cemetery, it's something called the Smallville County Farm Cemetery. The poor house cemetery? But, there's her parents and it's Aunt Susie. What to do. Oh, there's a funeral home mentioned, they had just opened up that year. You write to the city asking them to forward your letter to that funeral home if it still exists. Thankfully, it does and they have records back that far. But the undertaker, not being the most literate in the neighborhood, had scribbled her name down in an almost unreadable handwriting - something like Sussie Spastic, dying March 1st, 1899 at age 99 years, 11 months and 30 days in Smallville, USA.. Said she was a widow and left no living family. But, it had here buried in the Spastic Cemetery. Throwing up your hands in despair, you brow-beat your spouse into agreeing to take his golfing vacation in Aunt Susie's death county. He figures that surely there is a golf course somewhere around this town, which of course there isn't. You finally make it to Susie's little village and start looking for records and the 3 cemeteries that have been cited. You start out at the courthouse and of course, Susie didn't leave a will disbursing all the supposed fortunes to her maybe/maybe not children. Her name doesn't appear on any deed, she didn't even jaywalk and get run over by a charging buggy! She must not have attended church anyplace or she went by an alias or slipped in after the service had started. No marriage license appeared in the records but you finally found the town historian who talked your legs off for an hour about his memories of Aunt Susie as told to him by his family. He rustled through stacks of papers in his briefcase and said that yes, she was buried at the County Farm. Head down in despair, you walked to the city cemetery just to be on the safe side. You try to ignore your spouse's very apparent impatience as he stands beside the car taking practice swings. You walk up and down every row in the huge cemetery, in the boiling down sun, there is no custodian you can ask. You're looking for BIG monuments, maybe even with fresh flowers, but alas and alack - no one by the surname of Spastic is buried there. Sadly, you trudge back to the car and following the directions given by the local historian, you accidentally send your spouse down a wrong road which just happens to pass the Spastic cemetery. Feigning having to stretch you legs, you bolt out of the car and run towards the cemetery. Which isn't there. You sink instead into a hog lot and on the hill are some angry looking bulls. You feel chiggers nipping away at your out of state and unprotected legs, a snake slithers by and you trip over a tombstone growing amongst the briars. Thrilled, you pull back the briars to see that the stone only shows "In Memory of ....." the rest of the stone long gone. Again, back to the car and upon promising your spouse he can golf every weekend for the next ten years, you head out to the County Farm. The buildings are gone and a plowed field lies to the side of where the people lived. Fighting tears, you get out anyway; seems the new owner of the land plowed under the cemetery and was sowing it in oats. There you stand, camera in hand, cleaning tools - everything a good cemetery hunter would have - and out at one edge you see something. Is it just a field rock? An animal? Slowly you struggle your way over to this object, not as eager, and a lot more fatigued that you were at your arrive in Smallsville. Well, it's a stone anyway ... and it has something written on it. Might as well look while you're here. You sink down into the furrowed land, too tired to bend over even and there it is ... yes! Susie Spastic, birth and death dates, the notation that she was the relict of Simpson Spastic, and mother of 13 children. Guess she made up her mind after all on all her suitors. Your spouse found you there, sobbing and clutching that old stone. No fancy oblisk marked her grave, no fresh flowers on her grave, no mourners ... just a little old native stone, carved by a pocket knife, but Aunt Susie - you are not alone! The moral of the story? Besides not giving up but following the adage of "try, try again.", we can expect conflicting data. There are errors lurking everywhere to trip us up. Family memories can fade, change and be embellished over the years. What looked like a big stone in a big cemetery to a young family member, could instead be a tiny marker in a poor farm cemetery. What the editor of the paper said likely came to him second hand from someone in the area who reported the death; he could have never met the individual. County documents could have been lost, miss-filed, or maybe Susie never did anything to get her name in print! Funeral home records are taken from information provided by the family and maybe they forget to mention a spouse, a child, got the date of death wrong, and lots of times, the burial location wrong. Older documents, dating back to Uncle Sanford can have havoc played with them. Had you considered there were more than one Sanford Smaltz? Or that they were Jr and Sr? Or nephews? Or no relation at all? Or have you thought that maybe there were brothers coming over but once they hit shore, they went their separate ways and in a generation or so, had lost the knowledge of the other brothers? But that for some reason, they named some of their children after their kin folk? Or that Uncle Sanford was in all the places you found, but was footloose and fancy free and wandered all over the states? So who do you believe? Until you have concrete, documented, 100% positive proof of your puzzling Uncle Sanford or Aunt Susie ... show it on your records as UNCONFIRMED. Once you enter the information in a book or on a website, people will grab it as Gospel truth and conveniently skip over the inconsistencies. Maybe it's better not to enter it at all and put a note to the effect "in progress" and don't let the conflicting data get out to anyone except someone who is trying to help you. So to all of you out there who have gone through, or will go through some of the above, I salute you. We all have our Uncle Sanford's and Aunt Susie's. They're as maddening to us as they are to you and some of us have been trying to sort them out for 30 or more years. (c) Copyright 25 September 2003, All Rights Reserved, sgorin@glasgow-ky.com Colonel Sandi Gorin SCKY Links: http://www.public.asu.edu/~moore/Gorin.html SCKY surname registry sites: http://www.rootsweb.com/~kyclinto/reg.html http://www.rootsweb.com/~kyclinto/forms/SCKYreg.html Gorin Publishing: http://ggpublishing.tripod.com/