Is it time to rethink traditional genealogical assumptions?

A recent news article about a woman in Bangladesh who gave birth twice nearly a month apart (See CBS News) started me thinking about some of the traditional assumptions we make about the world as genealogists. More than thirty years ago, when I first became involved in serious genealogical research I was introduced to some "assumptions" about families, marriages, ages, and over the years these "rules of thumb" have become almost codified.

For example, one such "rule of thumb" is that when you find a marriage record, you can estimate the date of birth of the individuals. The time period is around 19 to 20 years before the marriage. I still see these birth dates appearing regularly online with "about" dates. Granted such an estimate may be helpful in finding a birth record if one exists, but too many times, that estimate becomes codified into an exact birth date even in the absence of any birth record.

Now, with the story above, we have an example, if you believe the story, of a woman who had three babies 26 days apart, a single birth and then twins. If I ran across this situation in a historical record, I would automatically assume that the second birth had to be a different family. Two children born less than a month apart could not be siblings. Perhaps, this assumption fits the general community, but there appear to be exceptions. Does the exception prove the rule in all cases? I never did understand how an exception could prove anything. If there are exceptions then the rules are not rules but assumptions.

The history of Science (with a capital S) is full of theories and rules that have been disproven when exceptions were found. Isn't it about time we revise our way of thinking about genealogy and start looking at genealogical research as true historical research where we rely on actual sources and stop filling in the gaps with speculation? Another example. If we go back in history, we soon learn that the age at which young could marry was and is mostly culturally determined. What is the "law" about the age of marriage in the United States" Well, that turns out to be very complicated. The age range, either with or without parental consent, between any age in Kentucky with parental consent, to 21 without parental consent in Mississippi. So, depending on the state, the estimated birth date could be off as many as 6 years or more. From a practical standpoint, for some genealogists, this means that a search for a birth record should begin much sooner before the marriage date and continue for many more years than would otherwise seem necessary and what about counties where children can be "married" at birth?

If you look at a chart of the average age of first marriage by country (See Wikipedia: List of countries by age at first marriage) You will see something very interesting. Around the world, the average age for marriage in men varies from around 36 years old in Sweden to a low of about 21 years in various other countries. The marriage age for women varies from a low of about 16 in Bangladesh to over 30 in many countries. How did those ages change as we go back in time? With any average, there has to be a substantial number of people who marry either younger or older to "pull" the average either up or down.

Now, with the gaps between the dates of birth of children called into question, I am suggesting that we throw out our "traditional" birth, marriage, and death estimates and start doing systematic, year by year searches for records. Let's stop deluding ourselves with estimates that can clearly be off by tens of years. If we don't know the date that an event happened, let's fess up to the fact and start leaving the dates blank and that goes for places also. A blank space in our genealogy is not a admission of failure, it is a challenge to find the records.