ROOTS & BRANCHES

When you’ve written 1,100 columns over a span of more than 20 years—and, OK, kept an imperfect archive!—there’s going to be some times when you return to the same subjects.

One topic that has fascinated me a bit is a concept that I call “origination” and “destination” records (I’m certain that I’m not the first genealogist to tackle this idea … others probably call it by some other name), in which researchers need to take a more elastic approach to “Oh, I’ve already looked at that.”

I first encountered it when looking at Pennsylvania naturalizations during the colonial period. Before 1740, men periodically appeared in batches at the colonial legislature for a law to be passed that was then forwarded to the British Parliament for approval.

Then Parliament decided on a more methodical approach: Men seeking citizenship would appear before a colony’s court and the records of these naturalizations would be sent to Parliament for final approval.

It was this latter system that produced the type of “duplicate records that aren’t the same” that I’m talking about.

The Pennsylvania State Archives has the “origination” copies of these naturalizations, which were also printed as part of the published Pennsylvania Archives Second Series (found electronically on the website Fold3.com).

The “destination” copies sent to London and published (along with a few records from other colonies) as Naturalizations of Foreign Protestants, compiled by M.S. Giuseppi.

So, if you’ve seen one version or the other—do you really need to go to the effort to find the second copy?

The answer is “yes” since some of the names were not copied accurately in the destination copy and some of the final lists in the 1770s appear not to have been sent to Britain.

I’ve found a number of other examples over the years but a quite striking one came up in my job as a research-reports editor for Legacy Tree Genealogists.

Pennsylvania had a short-lived vital records law from 1852 to 1855 in which births, marriages and deaths were supposed to have been registered on the county level. The law was sparingly enforced and soon repealed but for those events registered, there is an incredible amount of detail.

In this case the “origination” records were registers kept by each county and the “destination” copies were supposed to be sent to the commonwealth.

Here’s the example I found: the Berks County “origination” version has more than 300 deaths from 1852 to early 1855 (a microfilm of this copy is available, among other places, at the Berks County Genealogical Society) while the Ancestry.com version (taken from its partnership with the State Archives and obviously including the “destination” copy) has only about 200 and trails off in 1854.

Moral of the story: When you are looking at a record set, critically examine whether these documents could have other “copies” that are not identical … and then try and track down the other copy!