How to cite Sources with bad info

Question

When you have a source, say a census taking with all the names misspelled and the wrong places of birth, is it preferred to notate it in Amy way? For instance, in context it helps affirm family connections but looked at alone it seems off.

I'm not sure how to phrase the question. I am finding of course the census issue a lot. So what I've done is I have a notebook with 2 pages per father/mother pair. Along the bottom of the two pages I run a grid with census data to line up the people. Above each person gets an individual timeline where I write the date, location, and who/what associated with each item I want to use as a source for that person.

With this method, a source that seems to be trash becomes useful.  For instance one family who were early Illinois settlers had their names badly misspelled in several census takings and the state of birth changes (maybe because of errors, maybe because they were born in areas where the border changed TN/KY/MO). The errors are so significant it's only clear it's the right family using a lot of context from other sources. In Ancestry I go so far sometimes as to include an image of my notes page.

Comments

I simply note in the citation something along the lines of "incorrectly enumerated as Schmyth".

Answer 1

I know exactly what you mean, census data is rife with errors in spelling, ages, birth locations, you name it.  There's no specific style guidance on this; I don't think we need it yet.  Personally, unless the case is really egregious, I don't bother with an annotation - the text in the biography shows what the conclusions of the research are, and the sources generally make sense when you see the final product.  In cases where it really helps to have a note, I just add it to the citation at the end - listed as Velsem instead of Wilson family, age mistranscribed by 20 years, whatever.

Comments

I had one case, that I can't locate right now, where the census taker got offline when writing down the birth location and parents birth location; so the eldest daughter got the birth location and parents birth location of the mother, the mother got the father's info, and the father's info was just rubbish.  Since I was using the census data on birth location to help correlate families, that was enough of a mess that I just wrote it up directly in the biography to explain it all.

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Thank you!

I'm thinking ...

Where the problem leaves some doubt about the facts listed, I'll make a note. If I'm extremely confident that source is relevant to that set of facts I'll not comment (come to think of it, commenting on every census thing would fill up the page).

Answer 2

Even a presumably bad source is still a useful source. I run into these on occasion and still cite them. I typically make a highlited note below the source using ''' on each side to make the letters pop out from the rest of the text. Example; '''Notes for source'''. There are other ways but this is what I use.

Here's where I used this highlighting method to make the names and the name of the cemetery stand out.

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Hood-1155

Answer 3

I generally will comment on my sources using an indented source and comments in the front. For example:

I'll stick an "*" in the front, single space, then state something like "Potential issue with source - mother's name does not match"

The follow it on the next line with two "**" a space and then the source. It keeps the two components together and allows you to see that it's clearly that source that the comment was aimed towards. Of course this won't work as well with inline sourcing, but I haven't quite mastered that trick just yet so that I can both comment and inline source at the same time. I'm sure there's a way.