Good Enough

Perfection is the enemy

The Devil is in the details. Or, so I have heard. But that aphorism, according to Tally over on Medium, “derives from an earlier German proverb — “Der liebe Gott steckt im detail”, which translates as ‘God is in the detail’.”

Any genealogy researcher can tell you that both are true. If you read my earlier posts, The Corruption of Names, or Finding John Witter, you can see examples of the details playing games and hiding in the available evidence, sometimes enlightening me and sometimes taunting me. In the end, I often have to make a judgment call on which facts are “correct” so I can move on to other mysteries.

Sometimes, my judgment calls are spot on - and sometimes they aren’t. I try not to let the fact that I don’t know which ones are which bother me. Knowing that there are mistakes, errors, or inaccuracies in my work is something I have learned to live with and that is why I am constantly encouraging people to reach out and let me know when they see something “wrong” in my research.

But for a lot of people, those inevitable errors are hard to accept. I frequently see posts in the various genealogy forums I visit where people are complaining that “you can’t trust obituaries” or “online trees are unreliable” as if the fact that errors exist prevents a person from ever really knowing anything. I rarely comment on that sentiment, but sometimes I will respond and encourage them to include the offending information in their trees, along with the evidence demonstrating why it is wrong.

In my experience, there are different kinds of “wrong” that can creep into the work we do and alter the stories we tell. Sometimes the obituary is wrong because the person writing it didn’t know the person as well as other family members did; sometimes the rank that your great-great-grandpa held in the Civil War differs from what was handed down because his children and grandchildren didn’t know the difference between an artillery sergeant on the battlefield and a post colonel in the Grand Army of the Republic. And that’s okay. Sometimes mistakes are part of the story.

There is a tendency to want to throw out or hide mistakes, which is perfectly understandable. But in genealogy, the best practice is to document everything and try to make the most accurate and precise picture you can make from the information that is available to you.

from Sciencenotes.org - What is the Difference Between Accuracy and Precision?

Consider all of the different records you might find that tell you an ancestor’s birthdate. Census records usually ask for the person’s age as of their last birthday on the date the information was recorded, which means the estimate of their date of birth might be off by a year. It can be off by more than that if the enumerator collected the information from someone who didn’t know the exact ages of everyone in the household. I have also observed a pattern with U.S. World War I registration documents where the year of birth is off by one year even though the information was provided by the person being registered. U.S. Social Security files are generally pretty reliable, but if all of the other evidence is also reliable and their Social Security information is different, how do you tell which birthdate is “correct”?

In practice, if the records disagree with each other, I create alternate facts for the different sources and use my judgment to figure out which is the most likely “correct” fact. If I find the “correct” information later, I still keep the alternate facts and add an explanation for how I determined which one was correct. This can be interesting - “this person lied about their age on their World War I registration so they could enlist” - or mundane - “this person lived alone and nobody knew how old he was” - but either way, including the explanation and the evidence saves everyone time in the long run.

Getting comfortable with errors (or the possibility of errors) can be difficult. Sometimes the family legend you want debunked and forgotten is something painful or controversial. It is still important to address it for future generations of researchers because if there is one thing we have learned over the last few years, it is that misinformation and disinformation are persistent! For some reason, even basic facts have to be re-litigated and re-proven before some people will accept them.

The moral of the story is that as hard as we may work to leave a legacy of “perfect” information behind, we have to accept that there will always be questions, mistakes, and enduring mysteries.

Sometimes, we have to simply live with what is Good Enough.