Mar 11
22
The Twin Hats of a Genealogist
Genealogists wear two hats. First hat is that of the rational, fact-finding researcher. This is the no-nonsense hat of the person who scours the information repositories, who photographs and scans, who copies, transcribes and indexes, who pins down significant dates and places, and who footnotes and documents every source.
But there is another hat, that of the assumer. I realize that budding family tree researchers are taught that assuming is the archenemy of genealogy, but it isn’t. Assumption is often the only thing that can keep the research going. To jump start it when it stalls. It’s like the third step of the scientific method: “Construct a Hypothesis.”
The problem arises when the motivation behind an assumption is questionable, like the burning desire to prove oneself related to some historical luminary. Of course, that’s not a bad assumption, provided your search goes back far enough and wide enough, since we are all related, in the earliest times.
But this kind of motivation is dangerous whenever it leads us to single-mindedness in our search, causing us to look only for data that supports our assumption, instead of simply following the ancestral trail to wherever it may lead. The former technique causes us to research the family tree from top to bottom, ignoring the fact that family trees grow upside down. You, as the researcher, are the starting place, not some famous historical figure you think or wish to be your ancestor.
The best kind of assuming is the kind that inserts intuition and supposition into the detective- work aspect of genealogy. This can be very effective when you run into a dead end in your research. For instance, an ancestor who appeared on one census record is not found on the next, and yet all logic seems to point to the conclusion that they should be. This is when it may be helpful to hypothesize.
You may want to assume that the person had gotten married and moved. Or, if you know the local history of the time, you may know that flood, famine, financial failure or some other problem had affected the area, and that moving was a common solution. Often, many people moved to the same place. Another assumption you might make is that the person changed the spelling of his or her name, or shortened it.
Assumptions like this are only working theories that allow you to plug in a what-if notion and see if it gets you past the hole in the trail. It isn’t jumping to conclusions as long as you make certain that you verify everything that you have assumed. In fact, verify everything you have been told, read, or assumed before you begin to rely on it.
So those are the two hats of the genealogist. I wonder if there’s any connection with the twin-billed, deerstalker hat that Sherlock Holmes wore.
