Five or six years ago I presented on the topic of “Law and Genealogy” at a continuing professional development conference. In my PowerPoint presentation, I used several examples from my own research to illustrate several of my points. For example, to illustrate one of five parts of the Genealogical Proof Standard, I used an image of the citations I used in support of the date of the birth of my great grandfather, Johannis Albertus van der Fluit (1894-1932).
What struck me at the time was how many sources I had for that one fact – 17 at the time. If memory serves, I think that was one of the reasons I chose this fact to demonstrate the point. Heck, I could have used this image to illustrate the principle of conducting reasonably exhaustive research!
That slide has stuck with me, so with “Most” being the prompt for this week’s 52 Ancestors Challenge, I got to wondering which ancestor in my family tree has the most sources. Not necessarily the best, or most reliable, or bear the most evidentiary weight – just most. Unfortunately, my software won’t provide the kind of statistics I’m looking for, so I manually went through the entries for all my direct ancestors up to and including my great grandparents.
The most heavily sourced of any fact for this set of ancestors is the April 13, 1919 marriage of my mother’s maternal grandparents, Milton Leo Burgess and Hazel Nelson, with 22 unique sources cited.
Not far behind is the list of sources demonstrating the marriage of my father’s maternal grandparents, Adrianus Komen and Elizabeth Bakker. I have cited 19 separate sources for their marriage that occurred on April 7, 1921.
Returning to Hazel Nelson, I also have 20 separate individual sources for her birth, which occurred on December 15, 1899.
However, where I can find the most sources is in the two folders of electronic documents I’ve gathered that are all vying for my attention. There is also a banker’s box of documents that also need to be written up. Unfortunately, I hate preparing source citations as much as I love genealogy!
A Deck of Ancestors 