Some words are more powerful than others. The word "why" is one of these. Why did our ancestors move to a new location? Why are there three birth dates for an ancestor?

Sometimes the answer to our "why" question is easy to find. A family moved in 1817 because the year of 1816 was the year of no summer. There was no harvest, and the family moved on to what they hoped was a better climate.

At other times, we must piece together bits of evidence to determine the answer. This is called evidence analysis, and we use the skills demonstrated by the television CSIs. Instead of fingerprints, we examine the evidence in documents and analyze where it came from and who handled it.

There are three key terms in evidence analysis: sources, information, and evidence.

Sources are things we can touch; such as a person, a document, a book, or an artifact. The form of the source is either original or derivative (a copy).

Information comes in two classes: primary and secondary. We decide if it is primary or secondary by looking at the person who provided the information. Was that person in a position to know the details and to give first-hand information? We don’t take fingerprints like a CSI does, but we do ask ourselves if the person who provided the evidence was in a position to know the facts. If they were, it is primary information.

Evidence is the information we decide is relevant to a particular research question, and it is our interpretation of what that information means. There are two types of evidence: direct and indirect. In a CSI program, when two sets of fingerprints are a match, that is direct evidence to the question of who committed the crime. When there is no direct answer, the CSI must look at all of the other pieces of evidence and assemble them into a case. The case indirectly answers the question, and the viewer clearly sees that the answer is reasonable.

Elizabeth Shown Mills created Evidence Analysis; A Research Process Map. It’s a one-page laminated sheet that explains the evidence process and how to develop the case. The new publication is available from the Board for Certification of Genealogists (BCG).

© 2006–2009

Connie Lenzen, CG

CG, Certified Genealogist is a service mark of the Board for Certification of Genealogists, used under license by board-certified genealogists after periodic evaluation, and the board name is registered in the US Patent & Trademark Office.