21 October 2019

Resolving a conflict: inst or ult?

In "Transcriptions and Their Sources ... An Adventure", BIFHSGO colleague Ken McKinlay posted on his experience attempting to reconcile conflicting information from various records for an 1840 death in Nova Scotia.
https://familytreeknots.blogspot.com/2019/10/transcriptions-and-their-sources.html?m=1

Sources on the death date differ by a month. Ken's description of his research is an example of how a careful genealogist seeks and examines different records.

He makes reference to a 2 inch binder "LAC Thematic Guide 1206 to Parish Registers4, Volume 1" found in the second floor Reference Room of LAC. Ken finds it valuable, but it hasn't been digitized.

I wonder if this is a document that could be digitized through LAC's DigiLab? It should be about 400 pages, quite doable in a few hours -- if LAC will cooperate.

A comment to Ken's post is that newspaper death dates at the time were often off by a few days, or more. If true, and it could be true of other records, how much effort would you be prepared to make to resolve a one-month descripency in a 160 year old death date?




1 comment:

Unknown said...

I would make the attempt until it forced my forehead to hit the desk more than 3 times.