I've told the story about how my Grandma Ruth Wheeler gave me boxes of photos back in 2012. Along with those photos, she had a Family Date Book that had been passed down since the early 1900s. I thought I had hit a gold mine! Birth dates, Death dates, Marriages, Parents, Children, Immigration, etc. So much information! This was also the start of my obsession with family research. I took the book, photographed each page, then put it away. It was already falling apart and I didn't want to destroy this treasure. It is now packed away with some other special photos. Once I had the photos uploaded to my computer, I poured over them. Reading each page over and over again. Some pages were written in German. Others in English. I started with entering the English information into a family tree. See the photos below for copies.
Left: Page from date book listing their marriage information
Right: Family celebrating Joseph & Honey's 25th Wedding Anniversary
(Year written on back of photo)
1920 US Federal Census for Margaret "Honey" Buer
1920 US Federal Census for Joseph Ilg
The second crack in my foundation came just recently. I wrote about it in another blog post. I have had a hard time tracing my 2nd and 3rd great grandmas and their lives, mainly in Tennessee. In the family date book, it lists the birthdate of my 2nd great grandma Oma, born to Logan and Maggie Dennis. It also mentions Maggie's birthdate. Then it talks about Maggie and Oma leaving Tennessee, and coming to St. Louis, in Oct 1890, and marrying Jacob Helfrich. That's it. No marriage date for Logan and Maggie or even for Jacob and Maggie. This has been my brick wall since I started my research. Since I've written blog posts about this, I won't go deep into it. The big surprise came when I found the divorce record for Maggie and Logan. It mentions Maggie's "adopted child" with the same age as Oma. It also states Maggie does not have any child of her own. What?? So that means my 3rd great grandma is not related to us by blood. So once again, the family date book is wrong. It states Logan and Maggie had 1 child Oma. Not true. See the three photos below.
Both are pages from the family date book that state Maggie had 1 child, Oma, with Logan
Maggie's divorce record from Logan stating she has no child of her own.
Those were the two huge discrepancies in my family date book. Those were enough for me to call into question all the data that was written in English. As stated before, I believe it was written by Honey. To be fair, the last discrepancy, Honey may not have known about. So she may have written it thinking it was true. But that also means, anything my family has said and passed down, may not be true. I am having to look at all this in a whole new light. My mom has confirmed her side of the family was big on hiding the truth. So I have to be more skeptical when information is given to me by others on that side of the family, unless they have some documentation to back it up.
Left: The pages written in German that actually list the villages they came from
Right: The watered down English translation omitting the villages
As you can see, just because you have a family date book that includes all the information you could ever want, it still needs to be verified by documentation. This is information is written by a fallible human being. Mistakes can be made, information transcribed wrong, or purposefully misleading. Don't be discouraged. The Genealogical Proof Standard has been extremely helpful in my research. It teaches you how to reconcile information that does not match and how to determine how much you should trust the source. If you haven't gotten a copy, I recommend you picking one up today. Don't give up if you have run into a snag. Just go over all your sources and determine if the information you received was reliable. Whether from another Ancestry member or a direct Family member, it could be wrong. So always live by the phrase: PROVE IT!
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