Sponsored By GenealogyBank

21 July 2010

There is no such thing as Completely Consistent

Records will not be entirely 100% consistent. This is particularly true for records that provide "extremely secondary information" (eg. places of birth for parents on their child's death certificate when the child dies at the age of 80).

One must aim for relative consistency and when there are discrepancies, try and find an explanation for them. In the case of birthplaces, it often is because the family lived there for a time, the boundaries were changing, etc.

Or the informant was clueless and just made it up.