? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? What is your Question ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
Thomas W. Jones, Mastering Genealogical Proof (Arlington, Virginia: National Genealogical Society, 2013). [Book available from the publisher at http://www.ngsgenealogy.org/cs/mastering_genealogical_proof , also available
in Kindle format through Amazon.com]
Since our moderator, "Dear Myrtle" asked us not to literally answer the questions from each chapter. it seemed better to look at what this chapter was addressing and answer that question in my own mind.
The whole basis of fulfilling the five parts of the GPS pivots around questions. All those questions running around our minds concerning a new ancestor we found. In this chapter, Thomas W. Jones, shows us how to narrow down the search to answer one or two questions at a time.
The need to "know all" pushes us to want to grab anything we can about a certain person we are researching without careful study of each piece of information. Another issue is the "copy-and-paste" habits we pick up in this on-line world we live in. Every piece of information we find will not be for our ancestor and to grab and add it to our database really causes us lots of issues in the future.
I liked the way he has us look at the main two issues when asking questions about our ancestor. We are usually stuck in one or the other mode...too narrow or too wide in our questions. "Who was Sally Smith?" or "What is the exact date John Smith was born?". Either one is not a good enough question to ask.
He showed us how to add supporting questions to our original one. The where and when questions help us form a better picture of what we are really wanting to know. The who were and whose questions help us determine family relationships.
Sources
The subject of sources is very deep and wide. And the quality and accuracy of the sources available are always questionable. They may be published or unpublished written items, photos, diaries, grave stones, scrapbooks, indexed records, microfilms, oral histories recorded, and even needlework like samplers where the person dated and named the creator.
Records are created to document or save all sorts of events. My favorites are military files, family Bibles, birth, marriage and death certificates and also probate files. There are so many records that are rich in family history, that fill out the whole of the ancestor we are researching. It makes their story come alive for us.
A source is the whole item, not just a piece of information gleaned from the source. They are containers for the content we seek. Those books, census records, birth and death certificates, deed and wills are in the sources.
Sources are generally categorized into three areas: authored works (like family histories), original records (those not based on prior records) and derivative records (those which have been transcribed, abstracted or translated).
Informants
Informants are the way in which the source is created. It is the "who created" in the source. There are three classifications of informants. primary (the eye witness), secondary (information gotten from someone else) and indeterminable (either a group of informants or unknown informants) I have a letter that was written to my grandmother...unfortunately the last page with the writer's goodbyes is missing....that person is my unknown informant.
The bottom line is that the source or container may have information, the content, that has all three types of informants involved. A death certificate comes to mind. The doctor who signs the death certificate is primary. He uses his knowledge to determine the reason for death and states the date and time to be recorded on the certificate. On that same certificate there may be the parents' names and birth places, also the deceased birth date. Those pieces of information may or may not be accurate due to the informant's, usually the spouse or child of the deceased knowledge. So in the same source you may have accurate and inaccurate information.
Question 5: Three relationship questions for my own research.
1. How did the marriage of E.R. Murry and Rufus Saphroney Black end?
2. Where did Joseph Elijah Williams really die?
3. Where is William Skidmore buried?
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