A surprisingly large number of the source entries in online family trees that have supporting citations to historical/genealogical records focus entirely on Birth, Marriage, and Death (BMD) records sometimes with a few census records thrown in. I surmise that the main reason for these limited types of records lies, in part, in the family group forms built into the online family tree websites. Many of the conversations I have with people seeking help in finding their ancestors in the United States start with a request to help them find a birth, marriage, or death record. They usually refer to certificates of these events without knowing that governmental certificates for vital records is a fairly recent development. There are states in the United States that as of the date of this post still do not require that all births or deaths be officially recorded.
My analysis of this phenomena is directed primarily at records created reflecting birth, marriages, and deaths in those countries that rely on the Western European genealogical methodology for recording such information.
Although some few states began recording birth and death information early such as Massachusetts in 1639 and Virginia in 1632. See Statistics, National Research Council (US) Committee on National. 2009. The U.S. Vital Statistics System: A National Perspective. Vital Statistics: Summary of a Workshop. National Academies Press (US). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK219884/. Full compliance by all of the states in the United States has yet to happen. The United States Federal Government maintains the National Death Index but the information in the index is only available to investigators solely for statistical purposes in public health and medical studies. The service is not accessible to organizations or the general public for legal, administrative, or genealogy purposes, etc. See “Data Access - National Death Index - FAQs.” 2022. October 4, 2022. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/ndi/faq.htm.
The vast majority of the currently available genealogy or family history desktop programs and website-based programs (apps) use a standard entry form for individual information that is mostly Western European based and contains fields for a name, a birth date and place, a death date and place, and a burial place. Additionally, most programs have a field for the entry of "christening" information based on the Catholic and Protestant practices of infant baptism. Here is an example from the current and relatively new form from FamilySearch.org.
As you can see from this form, birth and death are emphasized and any other information is not considered to be essential. The issue is that both birth and death information in the form of a specific birth date and place as well as the same information about a death is commonly not available in the specific form requested. In all fairness, I should mention that FamilySearch has recently added the ability to format names in a variety of ways with a drop-down menu of choices.
What happens if birth and death information are not available? Usually nothing. Many researchers continue to look for this information without success because, as it appears from the form, this information is "required."
There are research helps or guides that provide information about how to obtain "alternative" birth and death information, but these guides are relatively hard to find. Here is one such guide from the
FamilySearch.org Research Wiki.
The FamilySearch Research Wiki has one of these pages for each state in the United States and other, more general such pages for other locations.
Genealogists have developed methodologies for estimating both birth and death dates and have accepted the generalization of both types of records for the locations of both events also. Entries such as this one have become very common:
This type of entry is commonly a guess based on the supposed birth date of a child or a marriage date using an estimate of the parent being twenty years old. It is also noteworthy that the birth date is estimated and there is no Christening date. This indicates that the research about this person is speculative and not based on any specific record or records. This particular entry is for William Yates ID# MBKL-PDS. He is listed with 12 attached sources. From a cursory view, this person seems to be carefully documented although birth dates were usually not recorded at this time in England. This brings up one of the Rules of Genealogy #13: Genealogists abhor a blank field.
Adding a calculated birth date when no other birth information is available from any of the sources listed except the birth of a child is one contributing factor to mixing up people with the same name. As is the case with William Yates ID# MBKL-PDS, the best record for this person is a marriage record. There may also be a will and probate records.
There are two conflicting genealogical methodologies. One rule of thumb says to start your genealogical research looking for those events in an ancestor's life that are the most recent. The logic is that there will be a chance for more records the closer you look to the present. This method works fine until you get back to the mid-1700s and then you can never tell which record about an ancestor may have been preserved. So, you should always look at all the available records for the locations identified with the ancestor. The other method is to look for marriage records first. The reason behind this rule of thumb is that marriage records affect the ownership of real property and therefore marriages are more likely to be recorded. Either way, when you get back in time, records become less frequently kept, preserved, and available.
In all cases, you need to move beyond only looking for the BMD records especially when the records are probably not available. You can usually determine whether or not specific birth, marriage, and death records are available by doing some historical research. For example, it is commonly known that in England, parish records before 1538 did not usually contain information birth or death information about individuals. This changed when Henry VIII mandated the records be kept. Even with this mandate, uniform compliance with the mandate did not occur until many years later. Before 1538, a genealogical researcher must rely on probate and other records.
When you see an entry in a family tree that has no cited records supporting a birth or death date, you can assume that the information is likely incomplete and additional research should be done. But remember, the absence of a death record does not mean the person is still alive (Rule #2 of the Rules of Genealogy).
We should always go with the best and most complete information we can find in all the available records.
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