It
makes a mess.
You
may have thought I was going to say something else. Well, that, too. In this post, the names have been changed to
protect the innocent, it not being my intention to embarrass someone who took on
a tremendous challenge, and did fairly well with it, all things considered.
In
my data-gathering activities on St. Augustine, Florida, 1784-1821, I am working
in a particular set of documents, using a translation of them. This was a daunting task for any translator
to undertake, and an important one. The
documents in this set are old and brittle, and not available for researchers
without some clout. They are on
microfilm and also now digitized. The
ink has faded, the paper has yellowed.
There are smudges and worm holes making parts of them unreadable or at
least very difficult to read. And the
most difficult of all is that this entry under consideration is in
ecclesiastical Latin. There are errors
in this translation, and some of those errors are based on erroneous
assumptions. Here are some lessons from
this finding:
1.
Never assume that,
just because a person is mentioned in a record from a particular location, that
person actually was in that location.
There
is an entry in this set of documents about a baptism, attributing parentage
erroneously. The document attributes the
parentage of a person I’ll call B to a couple I’ll call A and D. This baptism took place in a location in East Florida, more than one day's travel from St. Augustine at that time. The translator refers us to another set of
documents, later and more complete, to another baptism purporting to prove this
point. However, the translator misread
the later document, and attributed parentage erroneously, not thinking of the
possibility of two people with the same name.
I found that B had a brother named C, but C’s mother was not D. Not only that, there was another man in these
records with the same name as A, whom we will call A-. A- was the one married to D, and they also
had a son with the same name as C (call him C-). The translator of the earlier set of
documents tried to establish that the surname of D was the surname of E and that they were one and the same person, but
this is not so because it was A who was married to E, and A- who was married to
D. C- had emigrated to the place where these
records were created. His parents, A-
and D, did not emigrate; they stayed in the old country. Therefore, D could not have been the wife of A and the mother of either B or C. So even though they are named in a record
involving their son C- after he emigrated, A- and D never were in the place to
which C- emigrated, where the document that mentions them was created.
2.
Never assume that
finding a name in a later record has yielded the person you think it has.
Here,
again, we have the phenomenon of two people with the same name. Both A and A- had sons with the same name; these are C
and C-, respectively. As shown, above, A was married to E and later to F, but never to D. A- was D's husband. E died before the year 1780, because
in that year, A married F. At that time
and in that place, pretty much the only way A could have had a second marriage
was for the first to have been dissolved by death. Divorce was unthinkable (and not approved by
the church), and even a permanent separation prohibited subsequent marriage.
C-
married G in January of 1797. By August
of that same year, they had their first child, a son, baptized. It is in this document that the name of D is
mentioned as the mother of C-. So the
translator of the earlier document looked in a document created 17 years later,
found the name and attributed it to the mother of C, when it actually referred
to the mother of C-, whose existence the translator had not contemplated. As for the spouse
of D, it cannot have been A. A married E
before 1764, the year that C, their oldest child, was born. E died, as I said, before 1780, because that
is when A married F. When A died in
1790, he was still married to F, as shown on his death record in the diocesan
archives, so he never could have been married to D. So the man the translator found in the 1797
record was not C, but C-, whose father was A-, not A. And A- was the one married to D. You cannot just go shopping in documents for
names and settle on one as being the one you are looking for. This is definitely not a “reasonably
exhaustive search,” and one record does not a confirmation make. More than one record must be found for
corroboration or refutation of one’s hypothesis. There is always the possibility of two
individuals with the same name, a phenomenon I have found repeatedly (and
frustratingly, many times) among the residents and citizens of St. Augustine.
3.
Never assume that
because you found one name in a record, he is associated with the other names
you want to associate with him.
In
another entry in the same early set of documents in this particular
translation, there is mention of a man we will call S. S is mentioned in a baptism document in this
set as the father of the infant baptizand.
The name of the mother is not entered into the record. This may have been a case of a mother who died
in childbirth, but not necessarily, as the record does not mention the man
being widowed. It may have been a
liaison that resulted in an illegitimate child and possible embarrassment for
the mother and her family. At any rate,
the translator maintains that the mother of the child in this baptism was M,
daughter of P. P was the consort of one
of the most prominent men in St. Augustine, who was not married. The problem with this is that there is more
than one man named S, and also that there is no evidence that either M or P was
in the particular location covered by these particular documents, a location in
East Florida, but outside of St. Augustine by a good distance. The translator refers to a specific entry in
a census done in a much later year in St. Augustine. All that the particular entry in the census
mentions is the children of the consort P and her prominent paramour. S is not mentioned at all in that census. M did marry a man of the same name as S (call
him S-), but that occurred in 1803. In
the year of the baptism in that earlier time in that place outside of St.
Augustine, M, who was 24 in 1803, had not yet been born! She could not possibly have been the mother
of the infant baptizand fathered by S. Quite
possibly S- had not yet been born, either, at the time the translator tries to
tell us he fathered the baby in question.
Here again, we have a case of two people with the same name, and again a
mistaken assumption and not enough questioning of both the assumptions and the
sources.
