Re: Genealogy For The Beginner

Bob LeChevalier wrote:
> Wes Groleau <groleau+news@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>> 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.

Nope.  Father was a United Brethren minister.
No Catholics among the children or their spouses.
Parents married in Illinois after the Civil War,
spent most of their married life in Missouri and Kansas.

>> 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.

Claimed to be tombstone inscriptions, and mentioned in the intro that
one might also check the records at _______ church.

> 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.

In some parts of Canada, priests traveled around doing baptisms and
copied them from notes when they got back to their church.  So that
might explain getting out of order.  But I don't see anyway someone
writing OR typing could see "March" and think they saw "April."  And 
obviously the proofreading was nil, because that was only one of many,
many errors, additions, and omissions.

-- 
Wes Groleau

Change is inevitable.
Conservatives should learn that "inevitable" is not a synonym for "bad."
Liberals need to learn that "inevitable" is not a synonym for "good."
                                -- WWG