Comments on truth in genealogy

This post follows one entitled, "Truth, Reality, Proof, and Genealogy," that I wrote back in 2016. 

At a time in our history in the United States when the issue of "fake news" has become a political battle cry for some, it is a good idea to generally review the concept of truth and how that concept applies to history and more specifically to genealogy. Genealogists like to throw around terms such as "truth," "evidence," and "proof." They (we) also like to consider that their (our) "evidence" proves our version of history. 

There is a huge body of writings on the subject of truth, but I am going to narrow down the concept to only those aspects of truth that directly relate to historical and genealogical investigations.  The concept of historical or genealogical truth presupposes some sort of reality that is independent of any one individual's concept of that reality. Truth is what ends up recorded in documents. If there are no records there is no truth, only speculation and ultimately fantasy. From this statement, you can understand the problem that occurs in an online family tree website, such as the FamilySearch.org Family Tree when there is "information" or entries in the Family Tree and no "sources" indicating where that information came from.

I mentioned that I am not going into Aristotle or all that, but if you want a fairly good summary of the subject of truth you can read an article appropriately entitled, "Truth" from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. I would guess that my view of historical/genealogical truth is called the correspondence theory. Here is a short definition of that theory from the article I just cited.

The basic idea of the correspondence theory is that what we believe or say is true if it corresponds to the way things actually are – to the facts.

In this case, what things actually are consist of documents and records. But what if the records or documents are "wrong" i.e. untruthful or false? Well, then we have no basis for determining what is or what is not the truth. What if there are no records at all? I already answered that question. No records = No truth. Hmm, but what if the records disagree? There we go, now we are getting to the real issue of doing historical/genealogical research. When does truth become opinion? Now you can dress all this up in some claptrap using legalese (as I have also written about extensively) but it still turns out to be opinion when records disagree or when there are no records. Essentially, you have discovered the "truth" when you convince yourself your conclusions (opinions) are right or correct. 

I am also staying away from any "religiously" established truths in this post. That is a private, individual process. From the standpoint of a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, our 9th Article of Faith states:

9 We believe all that God has revealed, all that He does now reveal, and we believe that He will yet reveal many great and important things pertaining to the Kingdom of God.

 Many genealogists can relate stories of finding information in unusual ways but this is not what I am writing about in this post but I do acknowledge and believe that we can learn the truth in ways that do not involve historical records. 

Now we need some examples. Here is a simple one to start out. 

http://genealogy.az.gov/azbirth/448/4480980.pdf

What was this person's name? What is his birthdate? Where was he born? Is this information truthful (i.e. correct)? Now, here is the harder question to answer. Is there any other document or record that shows a different name, birthdate, or birthplace? And here is the followup question, how would you know if some document with different information exists? 

Would you be justified in entering this information into an online family tree as the truth? Why or why not? By the way, I almost always refrain from asking why questions. The answer to a why question hardly ever reflects any kind of correspondent truth in genealogy. 

Here I get into the idea of "consistency." Truth is usually consistent with all of the information we obtain about a historical or genealogical event. All you have at present about this person is this one document or record. We have to assume that you or I will find more documents about this person and as we do, we can judge (make an opinion) about the consistency of the information. This is a simple example but there are a lot of cases when the date of a person's birth is not as well documented or as easily obtained. As we research records back in time, finding a birth record becomes harder and harder until finding an accurate or explicit record is nearly impossible because no such record exists. 

This brings up the Second Rule of Genealogy: Absence of an obituary or death record does not mean the person is still alive. We can turn that around a little and say absence of a birth record does not mean that the person never lived. So the idea of truth is flexible enough to adjust to situations where there are no records about individual events or even when the records that do exist are in dispute. 

So what is the methodology here? First, we need to find a genealogically significant record with the information about an event in our ancestor's or relative's life. Next, we need to form an opinion about the reliability of the information in the record. Then we record the information with an attached explanation (source) identifying the record and telling everyone where we found it. We need to keep working on finding more records until we die. Pretty simple!

Do we really need to worry about truth in doing genealogical research? Think about it yes, worry about it no. What we really need to worry about is whether or not the records we find justify our opinions and conclusions. Why shouldn't we worry so much about the "truth?" The answer is found in the Fourth Rule of Genealogy: There are always more records and when you find the next record it may completely revise your entire opinion about your ancestor or relative.