03 July 2014

Is the Time Period Correct?

I recently purchased a post card on Ebay of a church my family attended. When it arrived, I realized that my family probably wasn't attending at the time the picture was taken. The building has not changed much and it's still a great picture.

The point is that when researching always ask yourself if the time period is right and if you are correctly aware of the historical events taking place. Sometimes being a few years off doesn't make a difference, but sometimes it does. Churches merge and split apart, county lines change, streets get renamed, etc. 

And if you never stop to think "is this right for the time period," you'll never know.

2 comments:

  1. AnonymousJuly 3, 2014 at 1:04 PM

    Double checking dates, and verifying them against known history is vital. Building time lines for each important ancestor is extremely helpful. I'm constantly seeing family trees showing my ancestors came from Germany when Germany didn't exist in the early 1700s.

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  2. AnonymousJuly 7, 2014 at 11:41 PM

    Yeah but if you say whatever name was correct back then, you probably won't get the correct search parameters on your tree site and maybe the rest of your family won't know what you mean. Don't be pedantic if it will obfuscate

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