Mistakes we find

Good Morning!  Thought I would write a little bit about published records and the mistakes in them.  It doesn't matter if it's a genealogy, vital records, church records, gravestone records or a history.   They were all written or typed up by human beings.   And we all make mistakes.  The day we think we are perfect is the day we find that mistake in something we wrote!   It does humble us and I think we need to be reminded often of just how imperfect we are.

I found a mistake in Hale's Headstone Inscriptions of Thompson, CT.   I had looked at the family who seem to be all together and probably listed on one stone.  Without going to look at the stone I can't say that for a fact, but in this record it lists the mother, father, and then all the children with the notation that they were children of Frederic and Cesarie Bellerose.   But the last one listed is Nazaire Auclair Bellerose born 1854, died 1892.    I knew that he could not possibly be a son of this couple as they were born in the late 1840's.   The Auclair name is what tipped me off as to who he was.   Cesarie Bellerose was an Auclair and I think that Nazaire is probably her brother.   I looked in the Burials of St. Joseph's Church, No. Grosvenordale and indeed it listed him as Nazaire Auclair with the correct dates.  He was the son of Baptiste Auclair.

Probably the person, who read that stone back in the early 1930's, when this was done, didn't realize that Nazaire Auclair listed on the stone with all the children, really wasn't a Bellerose.   Could be the name Bellerose is at the top of the stone with the others listed underneath.   In any case, easy to fix in the record we have.

I like to use original sources, if possible, when researching.   In some cases, they do not exist anymore, but where they do that is the way to go.   I can't remember now what family name I was searching but it was an old vital record and in the published book the name just didn't make sense, so went to look at the original.   Being old, the edge of the page was worn away so that only a partial first name was there, but I was so familiar with those families by that time that I knew exactly what the name was.   And corrected the book

Older genealogies published long ago, when many sources we use now were not available, or the person could not easily get to the places, can have big mistakes in them.   Not because the person writing them was incompetent, but because they did not have access to all we do today.   The old Richard Church genealogy, published in the very early 1900's, is an example.  I was asked to prove a line of descent from Richard Warren to this person.   And I found that it did not go back to Richard Warren of the Mayflower but to an Arthur Warren.   The reason I knew this was because of a number of articles published in later years in The American Genealogist, Mayflower periodicals, etc.    It upset the person greatly to find that they did not descend from the Mayflower Warren and last I knew they were going to have words with the Mayflower Society.

Now I am working on another supposed Mayflower line and even though the Mayflower Society does not accept this line the person is adamant that the Mayflower Society is wrong.   So, I will do what I can in proving or disproving.

It is fun to be a sleuth!