Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Discrepancies

Fact or Fiction? That's the dilemma that seems to hinder this kind of research. I was able to find a record of ML's grandparents in the 1910 Census, along with her father and some uncles. I hadn't found it right away as it was indexed incorrectly, but very happy to have it now! The problem I'm facing now is that her grandparents list that they've been married for 23 years. This 23 is present on both the line for Simon, and for Elizabeth. The problem is their sons are listed as 29, 25, 22 and 20. I also know there are some daughters older than that too. So, is it an error in the transcription? Was the information just flat out wrong? Or is it possible some of these children were from a first-wife and Elizabeth is actually the second? Dun-dun-duuuun! Have you run into similar situations? What did you do to prove it one way or another?

Another interesting bit from the census is that Elizabeth mentions she has 8 living kids. I've found 7 so far, so I'm hoping I can confidently track down number 8.

5 comments:

  1. Sean, I notice that there is a gap between the children age 25 and 22 and that the marriage is between them. I would start looking for a first marriage for one or both parents to explain the older children. If this is Ohio, Ohio marriages are on FamilySearch. Also you might want to search FamilySearch with only the parents' fields filled in and see if you can pop up other children. Send me a note if you have any questions.

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  2. In addition to the good advice from Tina, also keep in mind that sometimes the census taker makes the error. I had this happen in our family census records. Marriage and baptism and burial records will be key. Include researching all the children and see who is cited as their parents.
    Regards,
    Theresa (Tangled Trees)

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  3. Tina, unfortunately, their immigration was only a few years before the Census, so all of their marriage & birth records will be in Poland. And yes, using FamilySearch with the parents' names is exactly how I found an ancestor no one knew about! Great advice though.

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  4. Theresa, I'm definitely hoping it's an error and that I can somehow disprove it definitively. So far, all evidence point to them as being the official parents.

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  5. One other thing I was thinking about was this was only a few years after their arrival to the country. English was certainly not their native language, so perhaps they even got confused with the question or how to answer correctly.

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