I began to question this after seeing ELLIS ISLAND passenger lists where a whole page of immigrants were listed as five foot six tall. I began to wonder. Surely these men were not actually measured.
Well, when you're dealing with trying to find or follow a person with a common name, their age can be important.
This is also about trying to locate records of birth in another country.
Example from my research:
The same fellow is listed on various documents such as his wedding to his second, much younger, wife, and census records, federal and state, at different ages, leaving me with a six year range of birth dates to deal with. Was he chipping away at his age due to that younger wife, trying to minimalize the age difference? Did he himself not know his age or did other family members report false information to a census taker?
On all these documents from ship manifests forth, all other family members including that wife and children have correct ages.
It gets curiouser and curiouser. I've employed every tactic I know to locate his baptismal and have the names of his parents on his first marriage. I've spent hours on Familysearch. So you see, even someone with thirty years experience in genealogy research can hit a brick wall. I must conclude that his birth and baptismal records do not exist or his mother gave birth somewhere far from the family stead. It doesn't help that there were military actions in the potential years of his birth.
Wish me luck on this one!
C 2021
Note: Obituaries, tombstone, death certificates, can provide good information but I've found erroneous information on all of these. Yep, even carved on a very expensive tomb stone.
