One of the first questions I always get from beginners is "What do you do when you have multiple documents about the same event? Which one is correct?"

This situation often arises when dealing with the birth or death of an individual. For decades genealogists relied heavily on family bibles, obituaries, or some form of family based anecdotal commentary, to validate events. In more recent years with the creation of the Internet and the open access to scores of public information documents, it is now possible to become totally confused when trying to validate an event.

Take for instance the death of a family elder. The typical sequence of events is that the funeral home receives information from a source about a person and the time and date of death. This information is then passed on to state officials in order to obtain a death certificate. The information is also transcribed into an obituary to provide public notification that the person is now deceased.

In this one set of events you have the possibility of miss information in three different records: the funeral home record, the obituary and the death certificate. Not only can all three documents include wrong initial information they can also include transcription errors made by all of the people involved in their processing.

So now, you the genealogist come along and discover all of these documents. If they correlate and contain identical information your quest continues without complications. If the documents do not contain identical information you are then forced into a quandary of which document is correct. There are who will proclaim loudly that only the official documents should be recorded as absolute, thus giving priority to the death certificate. I, having researched for 33 years believe otherwise. I look at all three documents, compare them to any other family records or stories and then decide from that volume of information which document should be considered the most official source. In a rare case where no amount of additional information can be found to isolate a pure document I record all three and choose the most logical one as the primary.

Now back to our original question, "Which one is correct?"

It all depends on circumstances encountered on that specific individual and how much of a data purist, you want to be.