UNDERSTANDING GENEALOGICAL SOURCES & why it matters
In part 1 of his new 3-part series, genealogist Phil Isherwood takes a look at the nature of the sources we use as we research our family histories, to help us clarify the types of sources we may encounter and – most importantly of all – to assess how reliable we may deduce them to be
When I studied history at school I was introduced to the concept of sources. There were three types:
Primary Source
“An artifact, document, diary, manuscript, autobiography, recording, or any other source of information that was created at the time under study. It serves as an original source of information about the topic.”
Primary source, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Primary_source, accessed 2nd January 2023.
Secondary Source
“A document or recording that relates or discusses information originally presented elsewhere.”
Secondary source, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Secondary_source, accessed 2nd January 2023.
Tertiary Source
“An index or textual consolidation of primary and secondary sources.”
Tertiary source, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Tertiary_source, accessed 2nd January 2023.
I forget the exact wording used by my teachers, but the versions from Wikipedia, above, are close enough to how I remember them. But when I think about sources in genealogy, the definitions I learned in school history lessons are of limited use. As family historians our preoccupation is with the reliability of the information we find in sources and how it relates to our research question.
Just one source – a birth, marriage or death certificate, say, or a page from a census return – can hold multiple items of information about multiple individuals, contributed by multiple informants.
Each informant was in possession of varying degrees of knowledge, memory or written reference, reported with varying degrees of honesty and exactitude, perhaps at an emotional moment in their lives. (I’ve rarely been as nervous and emotional as when I signed the marriage register on my wedding day!)
The reported information was captured or transcribed by a clerk, registrar or census enumerator, who used their best efforts to interpret the verbal or written submissions and record the outcome. Their best efforts notwithstanding, the quality of their handwriting may have been variable.
The resulting document may be accessed by us as:
• an original of possibly compromised condition;
• or an image of inadequate fidelity; • or a transcript of perhaps uncertain quality;
• or an index built upon a now difficult-to-access transcript or original. Those single word descriptions, Primary, Secondary and Tertiary, see
