The 12 Labors of a genealogist – #05 – Check your information

With the arrival of warmer weather, here’s a new opportunity to revive the traditions of our ancestors: spring-cleaning.

As a genealogist, you won’t have to take the furniture out into the garden and kick up the dust on your carpets. Instead, I suggest you look for all those little grains of sand that get in the way of your research.

I don’t need to remind you how important it is to work with relevant, reliable data. If you’ve ever searched for an ancestor based on the wrong date of birth, you’ll know what we’re talking about!

That’s why, this month, we’d like to get you started on verifying your data!

Prepare for verification

I suggest you follow this method:

1. Check only relevant information
2. Check the reliability of the information
3. Identify invalid, inconsistent and missing information.

Check only relevant information

First of all, you need to define what information you consider to be necessary, so that other information becomes secondary.

Among the information you need are the surnames and forenames of individuals, their filiations (parents and descendants), and the dates and places of the main events (birth or baptism, marriage(s), death and funerals). Add to this list the places and sources of the information.

Other information (such as occupations, military periods, censuses…) can be considered secondary at this stage. This does not prevent you from collecting them as soon as you become aware of them for further processing.

Prioritize your checks on the information you need, and reduce the work involved.

Check that information is reliable

To be able to consider information as reliable, check these two criteria:

• Is the information valid?
• Is the information consistent?

Information is valid when its value makes sense and can be used. For example, the following dates are valid: “AUG 1903”, “15 DEC 1922”, “ABT JAN 1875”; whereas these are not: “31/15/2025”, “APRES 1955”.

A piece of information is coherent when its value can be estimated in relation to another piece of information. For example, a date of birth that precedes a date of marriage is coherent, but if the difference between these two dates is less than 10 years, it is incoherent, even though its value is valid!

Research only valid and consistent information.

Define a reasonable list of individuals to consider

At first, there’s no need to throw yourself wholeheartedly into checking the information on all the individuals in your genealogy. With a few dozen people, the work will already seem substantial (but useful!).

Don’t forget that this work will be repeated, taking into account your results and new information. So, for your first checks, reduce the list of individuals to one family branch and only a few ascending generations, for example. And there’s no point in starting with a distant cousin until your direct ancestry has been verified.

For subsequent checks, you can process other branches or increase the number of generations.

How to proceed?

1. First, define the necessary information.
2. Print out the list of individuals for whom you wish to verify the information.
3. For each individual :
   1. First check that the information is valid.
   2. Then – for valid information –check for consistency. Invalid information must first be corrected before its consistency can be checked.

Ideally, you should note the results of this work using highlighters:

• red for invalid information,
• yellow for inconsistent information
• green for coherent information,
• blue for missing information.

It will then be much easier for you to go back over individuals using this color code.