ROOTS & BRANCHES

As studious readers of this column know, my first career was as a newspaper copy editor.

Truth be known, I’d been a reporter on my college newspaper and a reporting intern for the summer of between my sophomore and junior years of college.

But when I interned on the copy desk between my junior and senior years of college, I not only found I enjoyed the primary desk tasks of writing headlines and designing layouts … I also realized how much I disliked the reporter’s lot of waiting for sources to return phone calls when oftentimes it was in their best interest not to return those calls.

I also realized once I was out of journalism—and starting being the occasional source or subject of articles, how difficult it is to get things exactly write.

It became clear to me how accurate the truism of “the closer you are to a story, the more errors you’ll find in it” was.

To a large degree, I had to accept the fact that there often will be nuances, shades of meaning and understanding, and simply times when things remain open to debate.

The nuances of the world can be the enemies of good genealogy, too.

In a fair number of my lectures, I talk about what I call “presentism,” which I define as looking at historical facts and happening through the lens of the present day … rather than putting them in the context of their own times.

There are many potential examples but I’ll pluck out just one: Since newspapers today do not run articles listing newborn babies or people entering hospitals in their local areas, you’d be guilty of presentism to think that they never did—while in fact before the establishment of rigorous privacy laws, birth and hospital admissions were staple items in many publications.

Presentism evolves from the need to make some starting hypotheses or assumptions in general. But as we try to prove those hypotheses through documents and evidence, we’ll often find that we were in error … sending us back to the drawing board for a new hypothesis, hopefully with better assumptions.

In many cases, our bad assumptions will be based on changes in the definitions and uses of words.

A favorite example of this is the use of the word “inmate” as a class of taxpayer on 1700s and 1800s lists.

From looking at tax lists and reading about them, I had seen that most of them were men who did not own real property. And since another class in the lists was called “single freemen,” I divined that inmates must be married renters.

I was close to right on that: Being an inmate meant that an individual’s personal property was above a threshold. While a major reason for crossing that threshold was the value of a wife’s dowry, moving from freeman to inmate did not automatically mean a change in marital status.

The moral of the story: Interrogate everything you believe you know … constantly!