Re: Genealogy For The Beginner

Wes Groleau <groleau+news@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>Bob LeChevalier wrote:
>> If people have a specific day month year, I usually presume that there
>> was some primary source behind it at some point, though it might be
>> 15th level hearsay.
>
>My great-grandfather's family history gives specific birthdates
>for all his twelve siblings.  Most of them are they day after
>the dates in his mother's Civil War pension file.  Is that weird?

No. In French and Canadian records quite often the baptism date is
recorded (and remembered by the family) as the date of birth, even
though it is often the day after the actual birth.  If the family you
describe was Catholic, I'd suspect that is what the family remembers.

(In Quebec and in pre-Revolutionary France, there were no civil
records - the church baptismal and burial records were the primary
vital records.  In many cases they only say when the person was
baptized, not when he was born, and people just take that as the
effective date of birth, because it is the only date recorded.

Sometimes they'll say "born yesterday", or the ambiguous "born the
night before" I think could either be the immediately preceding night
or the night before that, but the usage of those phrases isn't
constant.  A goodly number of French genealogists record the baptism
date as the birth date - maybe their software lacks the dual fields -
as I recall, ancestry's on-line data entry also lacks the ability to
enter a date as baptism rather than birth, thus ensuring the
promulgation of error.)

>In the library here, there is a publication of the local genealogical
>society pur****ting to be tombstone inscriptions of a small cemetery
>near me. It omits many stones, includes much info that is NOT on the
>stones, and gets dates wrong that are clear and easy-to-read on the 
>stones.


Sounds like they may be cemetery records rather than tombstone
records.  The tombstone dates were of course what the stonecutter was
given, which may not have been the same do***ent that ended up in the
cemetery records.

>(And changing March to April is _not_ a typo).

Going through French baptism records, which are written in the books
sequentially, just this past night I ran across a series of dates 10
Jan, 13 Jan, 14 Nov, 20 Jan.  Recording the month wrong can in fact be
a typo.

lojbab