Genealogy of the French in North America

About the errors

On many family sheets, you will see notes in yellow.  They can be notes relevant to a person and following the personal data or family notes and shown under the name of parents.

Here are some examples.

First of all, there are sources and notes.  The sources are delimited by round parenthesis, e.g. PRDH, DGFA, DGFQ and the publication Le père Pierre Chaumonot de la Compagnie de Jésus : autobiographie et pièces inédites according to the first field following the birth data.  In the 4th example, the burial is from CNF 185.  Notes are delimited by a yellow box: Note, Error, Conflict or Origin.  A note has more details.  An error is a mistake found in another work (i.e. what follows the word "error" is the mistake to correct if your data is from that source).  A conflict indicates that two (or more) sources have different data.  A note about the origin will tell usually that no foreign record was found, there is a gap in the records or the family name was found at that place, all this being about immigrants.  Let's explain the examples.

In the two first cases, a source, likely an original record, tells us that Jean François and François are from Reims or Rennes.  However, the birth record is known proving that this origin is wrong, despite it is on the original record.

In the third example, there is a typo in another source and the actual date is found in the original records.

In the last example, there are two mistakes.  First of all, the source FO 28 (Fichier Origine, version 28) says that Siméon is born in Nice while the source indicates Moret-St-Memmes, Nice being the place of death.  Also, the place of birth, Moret-St-Memmes, doesn't exist.  Data in the CNF book are often from secondary sources, the religious archives and not the records in France.  After an extensive search, the only place that could be found was the parish St-Mamers de Moret.

The errors about couples are similar.  However, in some cases, they are individual notes displayed under the couple listing because they are too long.  Here is an example about a couple:

Error: m 1728-10-14 (prdh)

The marriage (m) according to the source prdh is supposed to occur the 1728-10-14 while a more reliable source (usually a copy of the original record) shows another date.

Why declaring the mistakes ?

Telling about the known errors has the purpose of limiting their extension.  That is, if you copied an erroneous data without knowing it, you will repeat it.  If it is your mistake, i.e. a source not reproduced as is, the error has a limited range because there are so many errors on the Internet today that it is anyway necessary to compare many different web sites.  But if the error is from a reliable source that everybody is copying, then all those web sites may have reproduced the same mistake and you will have a wrong data.

By emphasing the error, you can correct your own work and even tell your cousins having common ancestors.  This is quite necessary with data released recently.  Many genealogists trust blindly the Fichier Origine for foreign record, but I found many mistakes by comparing with their own sources.  Other are relying on Tanguay, the Red Drouin or Jetté for rebuilt families or marriage, even if Tanguay was corrected by Leboeuf, Drouin by himself (see the three appendices with corrections and dated 1978, 1979 and 1985) and Jetté by himself (in 1996) and by Denis Beauregard (in 1998), the late René Jetté later suggesting to genealogists to send their error report to Beauregard.  The advanced genealogist finds out that any important work will become a copied reference but also that it contains mistakes and it is very hard to correct them because of the size of the work and the many sources that can publish about those mistakes (books on the same topic, genealogical reviews, the next version of a répertoire, etc.).