Primary Sources

[purplecat]

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.

Comments

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

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.

[purplecat]

Actually, you're right. I had a sort of secondary concern about why someone cared whether it was primary or secondary. Surely the important part was understanding the degree to which it could be relied upon to draw conclusions... I can see the primary/secondary distinction was important when I did history at A level because the concern was to get us to start approaching texts critically and its a useful crude categorisation at that level but once you get beyond that it is presumably more useful to approach each piece of evidence on a case-by-case basis/