Entry tags:
Primary Sources
I'm hoping the historians on my flist can help me out here. One of the genealogy mailing lists I'm on has just had a discussion about census data seeming to conclude that it is "not a primary source". My, admitedly hazy and lay-person, view of primary sources was that they were original documents which (with the exception of direct eye-witness accounts) were produced for purposes other than interpreting events. In scientific terms I've always thought of primary sources as "raw data". Secondary sources are then those which draw on primary sources and seek to explain or interpret events through the evidence of the primary sources.
Although census data was compiled from forms and, in some cases, hearsay, I had considered them primary since their purpose was not to interpret but to provide data for government machinery and they were produced basically contemporaneously by people actually going round and gathering the raw data. The mailing list, on the other hand, seems to link accuracy as a key feature to the label primary source (and there has been much discussion of the fact that they are a primary source for "address" but not for "birth date").
I'm just curious to find if this is true. The actual labelling of census data isn't of a great deal of interest to me. I feel I'm pretty clued up about their accuracy which is the important thing when compiling a family tree: my ancestors have contrived so far to be mistaken (at best) and downright mendacious (at worst) about surname, parentage, marital status, age, place of birth, and "who was in the house last Sunday" - as far as I'm aware none have yet been wrong about profession on the census, although one fibbed on his marriage certificate. I am however curious about what appeared to me to be a rather strange use of the term "primary source", at least when making an analogy to raw data in science.
Although census data was compiled from forms and, in some cases, hearsay, I had considered them primary since their purpose was not to interpret but to provide data for government machinery and they were produced basically contemporaneously by people actually going round and gathering the raw data. The mailing list, on the other hand, seems to link accuracy as a key feature to the label primary source (and there has been much discussion of the fact that they are a primary source for "address" but not for "birth date").
I'm just curious to find if this is true. The actual labelling of census data isn't of a great deal of interest to me. I feel I'm pretty clued up about their accuracy which is the important thing when compiling a family tree: my ancestors have contrived so far to be mistaken (at best) and downright mendacious (at worst) about surname, parentage, marital status, age, place of birth, and "who was in the house last Sunday" - as far as I'm aware none have yet been wrong about profession on the census, although one fibbed on his marriage certificate. I am however curious about what appeared to me to be a rather strange use of the term "primary source", at least when making an analogy to raw data in science.
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The birth date evidence in the census is still primary because it's evidence for age, not birth year; the conclusions that people make about birth years from the evidence are, however, secondary.
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Out of curiosity, what period are we talking about here - or, indeed, is it just census data in general down to the present day? Early census data is considerably less reliable than later data, accuracy improving substantially in the middle of the nineteenth century.
my ancestors have contrived so far to be mistaken (at best) and downright mendacious (at worst)
I know that feeling. I have not progressed very far on researching my own family history, because it is a task that requires considerably more energy and concentration than I can give it at the moment; my family divides into people who don't talk about their past at all, and people who don't let the facts get in the way of a good story. Most of the census data about my ancestors isn't in the public domain yet, as they arrived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, although mother did find my great-great-grandmother's immigration papers (signed 'X') when clearing out her late parents' house.
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I'm not sure exactly what the original poster was referring to. The census data I use is that drawn from the England and Wales censuses from 1841 - 1901 -- these being the ones I can access easily from the comfort of my own home. On the whole I've found it pretty accurate, or at least when all six are viewed together a reasonable consensus generally appears to emerge, except in the case of age which, in some cases, is all over the place and occasionally gives one cause to doubt you are even looking at the same family... There are odd bizarrenesses though and, of course, apparently missing families even when you go through the census for an area page by page and don't rely on the searchable indexes.
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