What Do You Mean, the Tombstone is Wrong? How to Address Date Inconsistencies in Your Family Tree

So, your great-great-grandmother’s date of birth is recorded as 1875 on her tombstone, 1873 on the 1900 census, and 1872 on the 1910 census. What? Why so many differences? Which one is right?

Believe it or not, old records are not always entirely accurate. Here are a few thoughts for those of you new to genealogy about how to determine the accuracy of those old records. These are the most common sources of errors in United States records, but keep in mind that it’s a good idea to verify any data with a reliable source. 

Census Record Errors

Prior to 1960, the United States Federal Census was done door to door. Census takers would interview people in their homes about the household members, their ages, occupations, and so forth. This led to a number of problems with accuracy:

• Census takers often just spoke to the people who were present in the home at the time of the interview. This may or may not have included the people who actually lived there. A grandparent, grandchild, niece or nephew, or even a household servant may have reported the information. If the person reporting was not aware of birthdates, that information may have been estimated or reported incorrectly.
• Since censuses were completed by interview, census takers had to transcribe information from oral reports. As you can imagine, heavy accents or a limited understanding of English made this difficult. Sometimes neighbors had to be pulled into the home to translate, also leading to inaccuracies.
• Census information from 1850 and on included age. People with a lack of education and/or with a birthdate that wasn’t written down somewhere, may not have known it. Some people had to guess at how old they were, leading to inaccurate information in the census.
  

Tombstone Errors

You would think (and hope) a tombstone would have an accurate birth date, right? Not always the case. Since tombstones were often purchased after a person’s death, their family or close friends reported the person’s birth date to the engraver. Families often had inaccurate information. Why? They may have been told the wrong birth date or it may have been written down wrong somewhere. This error was then recorded incorrectly and carved in stone. Not an easy thing to change! Even if someone noticed the error, the family may not have wanted to go through the expense and trouble of changing it. Instead, they settled for an “It’s close enough.”

Another common tombstone error happens when stones are replaced. Old tombstones were usually made of limestone or marble, both of which do not stand up to the elements over time. During the 20th century, many families and cemetery associations opted to replace the old, deteriorating tombstones with granite headstones, which wear much more slowly. Since the old tombstones are difficult to read, people made errors during the transition.

One example is the stone on the grave of my husband’s great-great grandmother, Caroline Louise Ziemann Borchardt. Her date of death is 21 Nov 1895, documented by her burial record from Trinity Lutheran Church in the Town of Wausau, Marathon County, Wisconsin. On her tombstone, however, the year she died is 1896. The type of tombstone on Louise’s grave is the small, granite, wedge-type stone commonly used in the mid 20th century. It’s similar to the headstones for her daughter and son-in-law, my husband’s great-grandparents, so it’s likely that all three stones were replaced at the same time by their descendants. This replacement resulted in her date of death being recorded on the stone as 1896, not 1895, probably due to the wear on the original stone. As no one bothered to look up the church record, Louise’s tombstone now displays an incorrect date of death. Oops!

Genealogy Website Transcription Errors

Those of you who remember the good ol’ days of genealogy when you had to drive all over creation to chase down old records in libraries and archives must really appreciate the digitized records that now appear all over the internet. I know I do!

But… proceed with caution when clicking those little green leaves on Ancestry.com. Ancestry, Family Search, and other sites have thousands of hard-working people transcribing and indexing these records to make it easy for us amateur genealogists to search to our hearts’ content. What these people have done for us is wonderful! However, they are people just like us and aren’t perfect, so the transcriptions for these records do contain errors. Old, illegible handwriting, faded pages in books, water damage, and the dreaded “ink blob” all make records hard to read. If you are just transcribing records without an idea of the name or dates you’re reading, it’s easy to get it wrong. 

Other People’s Family Trees

Speaking of clicking those little green leaves, it’s really easy (maybe too easy) to look at someone else’s family tree and just copy the information into yours, isn’t it? I do it. We all do it. In fact, so many people copy facts without double-checking data, that errors are often repeated and repeated until they persist in the online records, even if an error gets corrected at some point. I’ve found errors in both my own and my husband’s family trees. Some of these have been corrected, yet persist in the family trees. Why? Simply because a person copied the incorrect information and never went back to review it.

Best Ways to Verify Ancestry Dates

So, how can you be sure that the date you have for an ancestor is correct? The best way is to locate a reliable, original record. If you have a family bible kept by a diligent great-great-great grandmother, you are a lucky person! You can be fairly certain that those dates are correct. If you don’t have this type of treasure, here are some other sources that are usually accurate:

1. Church records
   Pastors and priests were excellent book keepers. They recorded everything from baptisms, church marriages, or burials in church cemeteries. In fact, sometimes the local clergyman was the only person in the area who knew how to write! This type of recording was a part of the clergyman’s job, so the dates were recorded in a timely manner and are usually accurate. 
   
2. Government vital records
   If the date you need is from a time period when government records were required in a state or country, search to see if a record exists for your ancestor. These records have accurate dates, even if there may be spelling errors in the names. You might be able to access older records online, depending on the regulations for the area where the record is housed. Newer records are usually not available online due to privacy regulations, but you can write to the government agency in the area where your ancestor lived to find out if obtaining an official copy of the record is possible. In the United States, this would be the county courthouse.
   
3. Social Security death records
   The Social Security Administration has kept records since 1936 in the United States. If your ancestor’s death occurred after 1936, in the USA, chances are it exists in this database. Social Security death records are easy to access online and you can usually search for free.
   

How to Correct Genealogy Errors

Once you’ve verified that a date is wrong, how do you correct it?

First of all, make sure the date is correct in your own family tree and document your source for that information. This will allow you to prove to other researchers that your date is correct. Once you have that done, take the following steps to share your correction:

1. Correcting genealogy website errors
   Most websites acknowledge that their transcriptions have errors. They also have systems in place that allow you to report them. You can follow their procedures to report the error, the correct data, and your documentation to support the correction. The website will then handle making the change in their transcription. Be aware that it might take a while for this correction to show up in the search results.
   
2. Correcting tombstone errors
   No, you can’t take a chisel to the cemetery and change the date yourself. Unfortunately, that’s vandalism! You can, however, notify the cemetery management or cemetery association that there is an error on a tombstone and submit the correct information. They will put your information in their records for anyone else to access, should they question the incorrect date. You can also submit this information to cemetery database websites such as Find A Grave or Billion Graves.
   
3. Correcting census record errors
   You can’t change a census record. It’s a historical document that needs preservation. However, in your family tree and/or on genealogy websites, you can make notations showing how the census record is wrong and providing the correct information.
   
4. Correcting family tree errors
   This one is easy. Just contact the owner of the family tree and provide them with the correct information. Be sure to include your sources, so the other researcher will have proof of the correction. It’s then up to them to correct their own family tree. Don’t be annoying – people are busy. Just send them the information and leave it at that.
   

What If You Can’t Find an Accurate Record?

Accurate, verifiable records are great! However, they aren’t always available. If you can’t find a church record or a birth certificate from the county courthouse, go with what you can find. Even if that census record is wrong, it’s the best you have and it’s probably close. Make notations about known errors and inconsistencies and keep those things on your genealogy “to-do” list. Eventually, you may be able to locate better evidence, but in the meantime, it’s okay to keep what you have.

Good luck with fighting the good fight against genealogy errors and happy researching!

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Image Credits

Header Image – Image by Paul Henri Degrande from Pixabay

George Geer tombstone – Find a Grave, photo added by John Hoff63, https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/41346410/george-geer

Louise Borchardt headstone – Ancestry.com, records of user name us5girls_3234

Page of Old Records – From the genealogical records of Gerald and Ruth Dilley.

Old library books – Image by Pexels from Pixabay