You listed 13 reasons why the truth was not told and only one that asserts the teller was fully aware of telling an untruth. As you say, what's recorded is only "as reliable as the person who is supplying the information." You got it right, Paul!
Then there are the immediate ancestors who were known to make things up because they had an adversarial relationship to authority or were just fabulists.
Exactly. There was the story in my dad's line that his great grandpa killed a man in Alabama and moved to the hills in Arkansas and changed his name. We didn't know how he changed his name. My great grandfather lived long enough that I was around him until I was about 12 and he wouldn't talk about his father even after his father died. Someone finally found the record to unravel the story. He was working on a tobacco plantation after the Civil War and was, I think they called it a row boss. He was a boss over some of the freed men. He had to fire one of them (I'm not sure the reason at the moment). That afternoon he was sharpening the blades that they used to harvest the tobacco with and the man he fired came back and attacked him. In self defense he killed the man with one of the blades. He was scared that he would be tried and hanged so he packed up his wife and kids and they moved to Arkansas. He only swapped his first and middle name when he moved, but I didn't know that till a few years ago. He was aquitted by a grand jury and he never knew it. He was worried that they would catch up to him as things progressed in the country so he packed up his 2nd wife and the children who were still minors and moved to Oklahoma Indian Territory. He lived the remainder of his life there and was buried there and never knew he was aquitted and found the death to be in self defense. I think I have more twists and turns in my family tree than the roads in Arkansas. And that's a lot.
What an incredible story Wynonia. You have done an amazing job to unlock that puzzle. Part of the story was family legend but with careful research you have been able infill the blank spaces in between. I would love to hear more of the story.
I have to say I was baffled at first why a person would report their birth differently over the years - such an important date to celebrate by today's standards. It has been interesting to learn all the reasons a Jewish person born in the Russian Empire might misrepresent or be unaware of their actual birth date (trying to avoid draft into the army, migration requirements, lack of reliable civil registration, lack of official birth certificate documentation, illiteracy).
Shame or they know people don’t care, they only want the negative narrative so they can blast
Ours kept strict-journals, took pictures when camera came about, detailed records because it was their place in the family was. Now writing it I guess they were proud of whatever life was! It’s was their choice.
As I said in an earlier comment, my maternal great-grandfather shaved a year off his age from 1874 to 1875, but that appears to have had no logical rationale. His wife lied about her age (21 from 16) on her marriage certificate to not require parental consent https://gunnarmiller.substack.com/p/7ea046c5-4032-4f07-93e1-295b8583e31e , which did.
As I’ve performed family research, there appear to be eight major drivers for inconsistent and/or forged dates:
3) Benefit claims to hit certain age cohort cut-offs (such as Civil War pensions or Social Security).
4) Deliberately wanting to establish a separate identity, perhaps from a family association or previous marriage that went awry. In Germany, one is officially identified as “Erika Musterfrau geb. 5 Jun 1960” (especially on medical documents), so changing the date alone effectively makes one a different person.
5) Family tree construction confounding birth and baptism dates, common in cultures practicing infant baptism, where the register records the christening rather than the birth.
6) The recording process itself, where the informant was a neighbor or the head of household rather than the subject, and the record was compiled months or years after the event, perhaps by a harried census taker.
7) Calendar change: Britain and its colonies switched from Julian to Gregorian in September 1752, dropping eleven days and moving New Year's from 25 March to 1 January. A birth recorded 10 February 1735 in a colonial register is 1736 by modern reckoning. It's the one driver that produces a systematic year offset rather than a random one. Double-dating (1735/6) in a register is the tell.
8) Name reuse after infant death. A child dies, the next one gets the name, and a later compiler collapses the two into one person with a birth date from the first and everything else from the second.
I may have personally contributed to a future date discrepancy! In the early 2000s, I attended a large family reunion where they handed out blank family tree brackets so that we younger descendants could round it out with our spouses and children. My wife and I had married in Germany in 1996, but only did so officially in the US in 1997 three months before the birth of our son so as not to have to endure visa hassles and also for maternal air travel reasons. I put down the 1996 as our wedding date, but there’s a 1997 paper trail. Some descendant will doubtless be puzzled by that as well.
Addendum: Even date convention differences that persist to this day may contribute. An American reading a European document that says 9/11/2001 or 09.11.2001 may put in "September 11th" even though it was in fact "11th November".
That's why I use US military convention of "9 Nov 2001" in my tree software and written pieces.
My Mom lied about her age when she married my Dad. She said she was 16 and the witnesses swore to it when in actually she was 14. I can look at distant relatives Ancestry page trees and they have my Mom older than she really was. They say she was born in 1929 when she was born in 1931.
Thanks for this - I appreciate you naming the issue so well and focusing on the question WHY in a nonjudgmental way. It took me a LONG time to recognize that not all records contain truth. One example is my 3x great-grandfather. Based on quite a few sources, it seems he adjusted his memory of his birth year from 1829 to 1826 in order to be among the first European-background children born in the county. Every pre-1900 record indicates a birth around 1829, but in the final years of his life, everything says 1826. I also noticed the number of "pioneer rolls" and other commemorative events where he took part. Separately, a cousin and I are working on an Ohio cemetery record where we're comparing a long-running grave register kept by the sexton, the headstones, and official records like death certificates, birth records, obits, etc. It's amazing how many discrepancies there are even in the first half of the 20th century where the headstone and official docs differ in significant ways. Usually the errors are minor -- a death certificate listing the death a day before the headstone. But sometimes they are significant differences.
The interesting part of course is understanding why. Were they intentionally trying to manipulate the records, or did they simply just not know the truth, so gave at the time, what they thought “was” the truth.
I've been trying to track the exact birth date of my 2x great-grandfather in Illmitz, Austria (formerly Hungary). While I had thought (based on information he himself provided on his naturalization papers and recorded in census records) that he was born in 1860 or 1861, I've been able to rule that out and it seems more likely he was born closer to 1865. Why, I wondered, would he have lied? Turns out it may have been to avoid the mandatory full 10 year "reserve" service required after the mandatory 3 years of active service and thereby emigrating sooner than he would have been able to otherwise. Can't say for sure, of course.
That's a fascinating possibility, Kirsi. We often assume discrepancies in records are simple mistakes, but sometimes there may have been a very practical reason behind them. In areas with compulsory military service, shaving a few years off one's age could potentially affect service obligations and emigration opportunities. Of course, we'll probably never know his exact motivation, but it's a good reminder that our ancestors sometimes had reasons for bending the truth that made perfect sense in their circumstances.
After going back some way in the census records I discovered that my husband's great-grandfather had lied about his place of birth in all of them from 1881 onwards. It was quite a surprise as I had always thought they were a London family, but in the 1871 census he had given his place of birth as Newcastle, which I confirmed via the previous census and birth records, and in subsequent censuses he had just claimed to be from the place he lived in at the time (East London).
The hardest part is trying to understand why they lied. Sometimes there’s no logical explanation for the information our ancestors passed down. The interesting part is working out which stories were deliberate deceptions and which were simply things they genuinely didn’t know.
Great article Paul. When I first started searching I was, as many of us do/did, using verbal lore that had been handed down. Sifting through records, understanding the time period, laws of the time and every reason you’ve outlined here makes it clear that we will never know all the reasons why or how the history actually unfolded. At best we can recreate narratives that might be accurate - to the best of our own ability. Some discoveries I’ve made have made me laugh, some have made me weep. All have had an impact.
I am writing a series on my eight great grandparents (and their ancestors), publishing each installment on their birthdays. It just so happens that one of my maternal great grandfathers' birthday coincides with mine (a phenomenon counterintuitively not as unusual as one thinks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem ) ... that turned into a throughline for the entire piece:
"My maternal grandfather's father, William Edward "Daddy Will" Talbott (1874-1938), was born 152 years ago today -- or so he claimed -- on 17 May 1875 in Halifax County, Virginia, and died on 3 July 1938 in a car on the road back to Danville, Virginia, with most of a continent's worth of ambition, setback, and resilience packed in between. He is perhaps the hardest of my eight great-grandparents to document, and probably the most American story of all of them."
"Birth records show that William was born on 10 May 1874 to “James Talbott” and “Sarah E. Talbott “. Note that the birth registry book is a re-purposed register of deaths, with “deaths” crossed out and “births” written in. For some reason, through his life he used 17 May 1875 as his birthday, which coincided with mine exactly 90 years later to the day. His motives for doing so remain unknown."
"A side note: When looking over these pre-Civil War Virginia birth registers, one can’t help but be struck by the entries under “sources of information” often reading “Owner” as the relationship."
"My Halifax County Virginia ancestors left a handful of census entries, a repurposed death register, and a marriage certificate listing parents as simply "James" and "Lucy." That gap in documentation is itself a historical observation about two very different cultures of record-keeping: On both my father’s sides, Teutonic and meticulously written, on my mother’s paternal side, rural Southern and oral."
"Which brings me back to that repurposed death register, and the date he chose to call his own. The record says 10 May 1874. "Daddy Will" said 17 May 1875. His reasons died with him. But 17 May 1965 is my birthday -- a coincidence that, as I noted up top, is less astronomically unlikely than it feels, but still lands with a certain weight when you sit with it. I'm publishing this on that date, which is as close as I can get to a handshake across ninety years with a man I never met and very nearly never heard of at all. The first death came in a car on a Virginia road in 1938. The second one isn't happening today."
You listed 13 reasons why the truth was not told and only one that asserts the teller was fully aware of telling an untruth. As you say, what's recorded is only "as reliable as the person who is supplying the information." You got it right, Paul!
Thanks Marian 😊 the hardest part is the “why”
Thanks Marian 😊 the hardest part is the “why”
Then there are the immediate ancestors who were known to make things up because they had an adversarial relationship to authority or were just fabulists.
There are just so many reason why our ancestors might have lied @Lisa Maguire the tricky bit is finding out why
Exactly. There was the story in my dad's line that his great grandpa killed a man in Alabama and moved to the hills in Arkansas and changed his name. We didn't know how he changed his name. My great grandfather lived long enough that I was around him until I was about 12 and he wouldn't talk about his father even after his father died. Someone finally found the record to unravel the story. He was working on a tobacco plantation after the Civil War and was, I think they called it a row boss. He was a boss over some of the freed men. He had to fire one of them (I'm not sure the reason at the moment). That afternoon he was sharpening the blades that they used to harvest the tobacco with and the man he fired came back and attacked him. In self defense he killed the man with one of the blades. He was scared that he would be tried and hanged so he packed up his wife and kids and they moved to Arkansas. He only swapped his first and middle name when he moved, but I didn't know that till a few years ago. He was aquitted by a grand jury and he never knew it. He was worried that they would catch up to him as things progressed in the country so he packed up his 2nd wife and the children who were still minors and moved to Oklahoma Indian Territory. He lived the remainder of his life there and was buried there and never knew he was aquitted and found the death to be in self defense. I think I have more twists and turns in my family tree than the roads in Arkansas. And that's a lot.
What an incredible story Wynonia. You have done an amazing job to unlock that puzzle. Part of the story was family legend but with careful research you have been able infill the blank spaces in between. I would love to hear more of the story.
"The lie itself is rarely the real story".
I have to say I was baffled at first why a person would report their birth differently over the years - such an important date to celebrate by today's standards. It has been interesting to learn all the reasons a Jewish person born in the Russian Empire might misrepresent or be unaware of their actual birth date (trying to avoid draft into the army, migration requirements, lack of reliable civil registration, lack of official birth certificate documentation, illiteracy).
So many reasons! More often than not they remembered the actual day, like 30th June, it was just the year either couldn’t remember or lied about
Thanks Paul, a great deep-dive into this topic. In my experience these anomalies are generally shrouded in some form of shame.
We can never ever judge the choices our ancestors made without living through their lives.
Shame or they know people don’t care, they only want the negative narrative so they can blast
Ours kept strict-journals, took pictures when camera came about, detailed records because it was their place in the family was. Now writing it I guess they were proud of whatever life was! It’s was their choice.
Thanks Michael
Sometimes relatives get it wrong if reporting on behalf of someone else or after someone's death.
Exactly Jane, whats recorded is only ever as reliable as the person who is supplying the information
There's nearly always an element of truth in these lies that end up leading us on a merry chase with some amazing stories to uncover.
Absolutely! There’s always a sprinkling of the truth there somewhere!
As I said in an earlier comment, my maternal great-grandfather shaved a year off his age from 1874 to 1875, but that appears to have had no logical rationale. His wife lied about her age (21 from 16) on her marriage certificate to not require parental consent https://gunnarmiller.substack.com/p/7ea046c5-4032-4f07-93e1-295b8583e31e , which did.
As I’ve performed family research, there appear to be eight major drivers for inconsistent and/or forged dates:
1) Pre-marital pregnancy and/or “underage” marriages.
2) Wartime draft avoidance.
3) Benefit claims to hit certain age cohort cut-offs (such as Civil War pensions or Social Security).
4) Deliberately wanting to establish a separate identity, perhaps from a family association or previous marriage that went awry. In Germany, one is officially identified as “Erika Musterfrau geb. 5 Jun 1960” (especially on medical documents), so changing the date alone effectively makes one a different person.
5) Family tree construction confounding birth and baptism dates, common in cultures practicing infant baptism, where the register records the christening rather than the birth.
6) The recording process itself, where the informant was a neighbor or the head of household rather than the subject, and the record was compiled months or years after the event, perhaps by a harried census taker.
7) Calendar change: Britain and its colonies switched from Julian to Gregorian in September 1752, dropping eleven days and moving New Year's from 25 March to 1 January. A birth recorded 10 February 1735 in a colonial register is 1736 by modern reckoning. It's the one driver that produces a systematic year offset rather than a random one. Double-dating (1735/6) in a register is the tell.
8) Name reuse after infant death. A child dies, the next one gets the name, and a later compiler collapses the two into one person with a birth date from the first and everything else from the second.
I may have personally contributed to a future date discrepancy! In the early 2000s, I attended a large family reunion where they handed out blank family tree brackets so that we younger descendants could round it out with our spouses and children. My wife and I had married in Germany in 1996, but only did so officially in the US in 1997 three months before the birth of our son so as not to have to endure visa hassles and also for maternal air travel reasons. I put down the 1996 as our wedding date, but there’s a 1997 paper trail. Some descendant will doubtless be puzzled by that as well.
Addendum: Even date convention differences that persist to this day may contribute. An American reading a European document that says 9/11/2001 or 09.11.2001 may put in "September 11th" even though it was in fact "11th November".
That's why I use US military convention of "9 Nov 2001" in my tree software and written pieces.
My Mom lied about her age when she married my Dad. She said she was 16 and the witnesses swore to it when in actually she was 14. I can look at distant relatives Ancestry page trees and they have my Mom older than she really was. They say she was born in 1929 when she was born in 1931.
It’s incredible when you think about the how and why our ancestors were economical with the truth
Compelling reasons to not take things at face value and to keep digging...
Thanks for this - I appreciate you naming the issue so well and focusing on the question WHY in a nonjudgmental way. It took me a LONG time to recognize that not all records contain truth. One example is my 3x great-grandfather. Based on quite a few sources, it seems he adjusted his memory of his birth year from 1829 to 1826 in order to be among the first European-background children born in the county. Every pre-1900 record indicates a birth around 1829, but in the final years of his life, everything says 1826. I also noticed the number of "pioneer rolls" and other commemorative events where he took part. Separately, a cousin and I are working on an Ohio cemetery record where we're comparing a long-running grave register kept by the sexton, the headstones, and official records like death certificates, birth records, obits, etc. It's amazing how many discrepancies there are even in the first half of the 20th century where the headstone and official docs differ in significant ways. Usually the errors are minor -- a death certificate listing the death a day before the headstone. But sometimes they are significant differences.
The interesting part of course is understanding why. Were they intentionally trying to manipulate the records, or did they simply just not know the truth, so gave at the time, what they thought “was” the truth.
I've been trying to track the exact birth date of my 2x great-grandfather in Illmitz, Austria (formerly Hungary). While I had thought (based on information he himself provided on his naturalization papers and recorded in census records) that he was born in 1860 or 1861, I've been able to rule that out and it seems more likely he was born closer to 1865. Why, I wondered, would he have lied? Turns out it may have been to avoid the mandatory full 10 year "reserve" service required after the mandatory 3 years of active service and thereby emigrating sooner than he would have been able to otherwise. Can't say for sure, of course.
That's a fascinating possibility, Kirsi. We often assume discrepancies in records are simple mistakes, but sometimes there may have been a very practical reason behind them. In areas with compulsory military service, shaving a few years off one's age could potentially affect service obligations and emigration opportunities. Of course, we'll probably never know his exact motivation, but it's a good reminder that our ancestors sometimes had reasons for bending the truth that made perfect sense in their circumstances.
After going back some way in the census records I discovered that my husband's great-grandfather had lied about his place of birth in all of them from 1881 onwards. It was quite a surprise as I had always thought they were a London family, but in the 1871 census he had given his place of birth as Newcastle, which I confirmed via the previous census and birth records, and in subsequent censuses he had just claimed to be from the place he lived in at the time (East London).
The hardest part is trying to understand why they lied. Sometimes there’s no logical explanation for the information our ancestors passed down. The interesting part is working out which stories were deliberate deceptions and which were simply things they genuinely didn’t know.
Great article Paul. When I first started searching I was, as many of us do/did, using verbal lore that had been handed down. Sifting through records, understanding the time period, laws of the time and every reason you’ve outlined here makes it clear that we will never know all the reasons why or how the history actually unfolded. At best we can recreate narratives that might be accurate - to the best of our own ability. Some discoveries I’ve made have made me laugh, some have made me weep. All have had an impact.
Thanks Sherry, that last line is such a true one! All discoveries, good or bad, do have an impact!
Great article- I'm still wondering why my great aunt Winifred appears as a boy in the NY Census. 🤔
Thank you, my 2x great-grandfather Matthew Chiddicks once appeared as Martha Chiddicks on a census, I wonder if he knew?
🤣
I am writing a series on my eight great grandparents (and their ancestors), publishing each installment on their birthdays. It just so happens that one of my maternal great grandfathers' birthday coincides with mine (a phenomenon counterintuitively not as unusual as one thinks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem ) ... that turned into a throughline for the entire piece:
"My maternal grandfather's father, William Edward "Daddy Will" Talbott (1874-1938), was born 152 years ago today -- or so he claimed -- on 17 May 1875 in Halifax County, Virginia, and died on 3 July 1938 in a car on the road back to Danville, Virginia, with most of a continent's worth of ambition, setback, and resilience packed in between. He is perhaps the hardest of my eight great-grandparents to document, and probably the most American story of all of them."
"Birth records show that William was born on 10 May 1874 to “James Talbott” and “Sarah E. Talbott “. Note that the birth registry book is a re-purposed register of deaths, with “deaths” crossed out and “births” written in. For some reason, through his life he used 17 May 1875 as his birthday, which coincided with mine exactly 90 years later to the day. His motives for doing so remain unknown."
"A side note: When looking over these pre-Civil War Virginia birth registers, one can’t help but be struck by the entries under “sources of information” often reading “Owner” as the relationship."
"My Halifax County Virginia ancestors left a handful of census entries, a repurposed death register, and a marriage certificate listing parents as simply "James" and "Lucy." That gap in documentation is itself a historical observation about two very different cultures of record-keeping: On both my father’s sides, Teutonic and meticulously written, on my mother’s paternal side, rural Southern and oral."
"Which brings me back to that repurposed death register, and the date he chose to call his own. The record says 10 May 1874. "Daddy Will" said 17 May 1875. His reasons died with him. But 17 May 1965 is my birthday -- a coincidence that, as I noted up top, is less astronomically unlikely than it feels, but still lands with a certain weight when you sit with it. I'm publishing this on that date, which is as close as I can get to a handshake across ninety years with a man I never met and very nearly never heard of at all. The first death came in a car on a Virginia road in 1938. The second one isn't happening today."
P.S. Here's my first one to show the approach I'm taking https://gunnarmiller.substack.com/p/mary-laura-miller-1877-1949 . The next two, including the one excerpted above, are set on timers to appear whilst I'm on a sailing course next week.
Yes, humans are fallible creatures. Good list of reasons to consider in reckoning the discrepancies.
The key bit for us is working out whether it was an intentional lie or unintentional 🤔
Motives require indepth knowledge of character, eh?
Some motives were simply about survival 😢
Yes, and when you dig into the historical context of their lives, you can begin to have more compassion and understanding for the choices made.
We can never be judgmental of our ancestors choices we need to fully understand the context of their life at any given moment