John Blankenbaker's Germanna History Notes

Note 1627

(Hank Jones' Rules for Conducting Genealogy Research are continued from Note Nr. 1626 .)

Hank Jones' 4th Rule. Remember, Even the Original Sources May Be Wrong.

There was an instance of this in the last note when the clerk wrote, ". . . in Captain Scott."  Of course, his own choice of words was a tip off that perhaps something was wrong about what he wrote.  Here is another short one.  Conrad Delph and his wife Margaretha attended a communion service on 16 April 1778.  At every other communion service, Conrad's wife was Magdalena.  The writer of the names was fair though.  He gave Conrad's brother, Michael, a wife named Magdalena, while in every other service he gave her the name of Margaretha.  I have seen this happen with the older two Fisher brothers, when on one Sunday their wives were switched around (or was it that the husbands were switched around?)

These are the outright errors in the original records and they are fairly easy to detect because we have many other records with the correct information.

It has always seemed to me that the Germans were inclined to simplify the story.  Perhaps they had an aversion to wasting words, perhaps they figured it really didn't matter.  When John Huffman applied for head rights, he said he and his wife Katrina came in 1714.  Now you might think that this implies that he was married in 1714 but it does not.  He was not married until 1721.  They both came in 1714, but they were single people as yet unmarried when they arrived.  At the time of the application, they were married.

Here is a trickier one that would catch most people.  John Becker and Elizabeth, his wife, brought the child Jesse for baptism.  In fact, John and Elizabeth were described as "die Eltern", or parents.  Now, if you thought that John was the father of Jesse, you would be wrong.  Elizabeth's first husband had died, and she remarried before Jesse was born.  She did ask the brother of the biological father to be a sponsor.  Proving who the biological father was was not easy because it was an uphill fight to overcome the information in the baptism document.

The will of Christopher Barlow is recorded in Madison County, Virginia.  Where did he die?  (I think it was in Kentucky.)

A very typical failure is the recording of the step-children of a man under his name.  This happened in the head rights list of George Utz.  It also happened when the Gebert/Gybert family came from Schwaigern.

Several of these, perhaps all of them, could be said to be the result of simplification.  The story was a little more complicated than the first or second reading might indicate.
(Hank Jones' Rules are continued in the next Note, Nr. 1628.)
(25 Mar 03)