It’s About-Time

Genealogists spend much of there existence in “about-time,” that time that is neither known nor unknown, that twilight between mystery and understanding. Yet about-time doesn’t need to be as mysterious as it often seems. There is usually some information hiding behind the word “about.”

Perfect-World Type of About-Time

Where do we find “about 1811” in the about-time calendar? It depends on the reason for that “about.” Probably the most common reason we enter into about-time is an age. If all we know about an ancestor’s birth is that they were recorded as being age 39 in the 1850 census, we might write that they were born “about 1811.” That is not really all we know though, is it? If the age is accurate, then that ancestor was born either in 1811 or, if his or her birthday had not yet passed, 1810. A simple “about 1811” implies that 1811 is likely but that 1810 and 1812 are also fairly likely. That isn’t really correct. 1810 is quite possible and 1812 is impossible (again, if the age is accurate). We can even go one step farther. If we check the census day for 1850, we find that it was June 1. If everything was done write, our ancestor had to have been born by June 2, 1810, and on or before June 1, 1811. A birth in 1810 is actually slightly more likely than one in 1811.

Another source of about-time is probate records. Fraud aside, an accurate copy of a will implies that the ancestor was alive on the date the will was written. Outside of rare cases when a missing person was declared dead, the ancestor was dead by the date the will was proved. If the will was proved January 31, 1860, one might write “about 1859” for the death date. Yet it is trickier than that. Under some circumstances, it can by years after the death that the will was proved, making “about 1859” wildly off. Check the date that the will was written and discover that it was written January 7, 1860, and if everything is accurate, “about 1859” is clearly not right.

Sometimes we genealogists might estimate a marriage date based on the birth date for the only known child. Once again we have entered about-time, and now we are dealing with a marriage that might have occurred only a few months before the birth, as sometimes happened, or more than a decade before the birth. Here there is no true range. All we know is that the marriage occurred before the birth, and that though likely to have occurred within a few years of the birth, it could have happened anywhere in a range only limited by legal marrying age and biological impossibility.

The Evidence, Warts and All Type of About-Time

Because the records we deal with are created by real, fallible people, we also need to remember that the dating evidence might be wrong. This goes especially for ages. Can we be sure that the ancestor in question was really born between June 2, 1810, and June 1, 1811? No. That is what that one record tells us, but we cannot be sure of the accuracy? Misreporting of ages is common. In any case when we are in about-time we also need to ponder how accurate we believe our information to be. Suspiciously round numbers for ages, notes that imply the information was questionable even to the person who recorded it, reasons to doubt other information recorded by the same person, and conflicting evidence, should all lead us to be much less certain of our information. Our about-time needs to become wider to accommodate the reasonable possibilities.

Handling Errors

When I was a physicist, I learned to calculate the level of error on a measurements. The measurement might give a single value, but that value might be off. Errors on data points expressed how for away from reality those points might be, given the circumstances. Just as we just saw in genealogy, there were two types of errors. One reason for inaccuracy in physics is the number of measurements. More measurements give more accuracy by an amount that depends on how many measurements were made. Those statistical errors shrink with more measurements. If everything went right, the true value should be within the range given by those errors. They are the perfect world type of errors. They answer the question—if everything was fine, how close should we be to reality? In the world of genealogical about-time, this is the perfect-world range one gets if one has an age, assumes it is correct, and uses it to calculate the possible birthdays. Back in the world of physics, we also needed to think about systematic errors, those errors that might occur because of external problems, like a lack of accuracy in settings used. In a physics experiment, you might set a meter to 3.50 wangdoodles (not an actual unit), but the actual number of wangdoodles might have been 3.49 or 3.51. That inaccuracy can shift or blur results. Back in the world of genealogical about-time, this is when we take into account that we are not dealing with perfect informants, talking to perfect clerks, enumerators, priests, ministers, and sextons. Those records were not then copied by perfect copyists when the originals needed preservation. That is the source of our systematic error.

All those things are rolled up into our about-time. If we write down nothing more than “about” to tell the reader that the date is not accurate, we leave them to try to figure it out from any clues we leave behind. In the worst case, the reader is forced to guess.

We have different sorts of errors. We either know what they are, or have ways of estimating. We can tell our readers the rationale behind those errors. Instead we write “about.” Sometimes our tools make it hard to do anything else. I guess that we could do better.

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