There is a tranche of Ontario birth records on Ancestry with birth location indexed as "Prince Edward Island." PEI is a province. Ontario is also a province. They are both in Canada, a few hundred miles apart. Ontario did not register any births that happened in Prince Edward Island. It was not their business.
As it happens, Ontario has a county called Prince Edward. In the nineteenth century PEC (the county) had about a quarter the population of PEI (the province). If a Canadian moved to the US and told their children or a US registrar that they were from "Prince Edward, Canada" there was a one in five chance they meant the county, not the province.
About once a week I send in data corrections on FamilySearch or Ancestry for records indexed as "Prince Edward Island" when they should be Prince Edward County. Recently I was linking up FindAGrave memorials and hit this very problem, a birth location listed as PEI when it should be PEC. I sent a message to the memorial manager, who requested direct proof of the birth location. I explained that Ontario did not start registering births until 1869 but that (fortunately) this individual appeared on the 1861 Canada West (Ontario) census with his family group, birth location "CW" (Canada West). His US death registration gave his birth place as "West Prince Edwards, Canada," and I explained that had to be a mangled version of "Prince Edward, Canada West," which was the jurisdiction he left when he emigrated to the US in the 1860s (and which became Ontario in 1867, a name he was possibly never familiar with).
That modest piece of evidence, coupled with the linkages to memorials for his ancestors who remain "permanent residents" of the county, convinced the memorial manager to process the update. I didn't begrudge him the delay — places are a tricky business, and not every genealogist has geographic aptitude. However, if you want to be a competent genealogist, geographic aptitude is definitely something you should develop.
The cardinal sin of genealogy is confusing two people with the same name and confusing two places with similar names is the next most serious problem on the list.
To avoid both, you must do the same things:
1) You must check for doppelgangers. Are there two people (or three, or four, or — if you are researching Ireland — fifty) people born at roughly the same time with the same name in the place of interest? Similarly, are there multiple places with the same or similar names in the country or region you have identified?
2) You must use contextual information and other clues (up to and including DNA matching) to pinpoint the correct person or place. Avoid making loose assumptions or guesses because if you make an incorrect choice it will probably become an apparent "fact" about the person you are investigating and this is the quickest and surest way to build yourself a brick wall.
Use atlases, google searches, regional and local archives and library content (in Ontario, this is Archives of Ontario), and published genealogy guidance for the region to identify place names and check to see if you could be confusing two similar-sounding places. You also need to tailor the search to the time period you are concerned with, as place names change over time. For researching Ontario in the 1860s, it would be important to review the census enumeration districts, any city or county directories, Wikipedia articles which include historic place names, the McGill County Atlases project and local historical society websites. Do not rely on Google Maps as it only reflects our current reality and is easy to misinterpret — it also skews to "most relevant" results, which tends to misdirect people to larger population centers.
Of course, the first step in this process is incrementally narrowing it down using documentation. There's no way someone should be indexing Ontario Birth Registrations to places in Prince Edward Island, they shouldn't even be working with a list of places outside Ontario. Equally, for the FindAGrave memorial, he did appear on the 1861 census with birth location as "Canada West" and his descendants just needed to perform one key step (identifying that "CW" means Ontario) to be pointed — literally — in the right direction.
No comments:
Post a Comment