Sources, Information, Evidence

As I’ve previously mentioned, I’m spending a lot of time on WikiTree building out my family tree and interrelated branches.

I try to keep up with the conversations taking place in the main chat threads, called G2G (genealogist to genealogist), so that I can broaden my understanding of the work taking place within the WikiTree system.

Some of the chats contain a rather disturbing term: “primary source,” an incredibly nonspecific term which relies heavily (and for genealogists, dangerously) on published historical scholarship.

Decades ago, when genealogy as a scholarly pursuit was in its infancy, scholarly or academic genealogists borrowed terms from the law and the study of history, like primary source, to help them discuss the records they found, to analyze them, and to apply the information gleaned from such records and analysis to the body of evidence they then gathered into formal and informal proof arguments.

Those borrowed terms proved inadequate, however, and genealogists eventually derived their own terms, which were then codified in 2013 in Mastering Genealogical Proof, written by Thomas W. Jones and published by the National Genealogical Society.

Jones and others, such as master genealogist Elizabeth Shown Mills, eventually settled on three categories (sources, information, and evidence) and then further divided those categories into useful subdivisions.

Sources are either authored works or records. Records can be further subdivided into original records and derivative records.

Information is either primary, secondary (second-hand), or indeterminate (meaning, the informant for the record cannot be determined; their depth of knowledge of the information shared is unknown).

Evidence comes in three flavors: direct, indirect, and negative. Tax records may not include the object of a search (negative evidence), which can indicate immigration, death, or “aging out” of whatever laws were used to compile those records; but the inclusion of other family members may be used as direct or indirect evidence of the family’s presence, or whatever question it is that we’re trying to answer with our use of those records.

This isn’t a complicated system, but it does break each category down so that genealogists can more easily analyze records and assemble proof of ancestral and other connections. As I stated previously, these distinctions “are important for the same reason that it’s important to separate the form of a source from the information that source contains: because doing so helps us better understand the quality of both the source itself and the information derived from it, which in turn leads to better evidence (of all kinds) and, ultimately, to better proof.”

Our goal should always be to strive for the best proof argument possible, assembled through thorough research and sound analysis.

I encourage every serious genealogist, of whatever skill level, to understand the terminologies used by advanced and professional genealogists. “Primary source” has no meaning to serious genealogists, and its continued use introduces confusion to an otherwise simple system.