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purplecat ([personal profile] purplecat) wrote2007-07-30 08:30 pm
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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.

[identity profile] parrot-knight.livejournal.com 2007-07-30 08:11 pm (UTC)(link)
Accuracy has little to do with being a primary source. I'd consider census data as primary, because even if the data includes interpretation, it's not historical interpretation; it's someone making sense of the situation they were in at the time, and as such is much like manuscript correspondence. The example of which I'm thinking is the 1851 census where my great-great-grandfather, Christopher, is described as a 'farm servant'; but his employer, described as a farmer by the clerk who made the initial entry, is then downgraded (as are other farmers in the area) on the grounds (explained in a marginal note) that although possessed of substantial acreage he only has a small proportion of it in cultivation. My reading of that is that the overwriting senior official thought that the agricultural depression was the fault of farmers choosing not to be industrious; but I have no evidence for that. The overwriting clerk's decision is still, to me, primary evidence because it's a voice from the time.

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.

[identity profile] daniel-saunders.livejournal.com 2007-07-30 09:12 pm (UTC)(link)
With the obvious caveat that I never went above undergraduate level and so can't really call myself a historian, I'd agree with parrot_knight.

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.

[identity profile] skordh.livejournal.com 2007-07-30 09:23 pm (UTC)(link)
I agree with them. Census data is primary in my view. But then I don't recall being taught the difference since first year secondary school! Certainly not in the undergraduate syllabus...

[identity profile] parrot-knight.livejournal.com 2007-07-30 09:29 pm (UTC)(link)
Agreed. It's a useful division to teach at school, but becomes difficult to maintain as a clear dividing line the further one gets. There are lots and lots of different criteria used when assessing evidence, and 'primary' and 'secondary' fragment and mingle under close examination.