Following is a repeat of an older blog post I wrote that think is important to revisit because we all need to remember this as we search for our ancestors.
I was puzzled as to why I'd saved it but figured there had to be an article featuring someone I knew. Sure enough there was. The article was a glowing report of a man, we'll call him Sam. Let me preface this with the fact that I knew, and still know, Sam very well.
The article revealed that Sam had a high-paying career and was also a rather successful emerging artist (I use the word artist to describe actors, writers, poets, painters, sculptors). Sam worked part-time to support his art and his yearly wages which were given in the article were extremely good.
The article portrayed Sam as a very successful person pursuing his dream while earning a more than decent living. A descendant finding this article 50 or 100 or more years from now would be thrilled to think their ancestor was such an amazing person!
But the author of the article only knew Sam for a brief moment in Sam's life. I've known him for a very long time and also know what has happened to Sam over the past 24 years since the article was written.
The truth is that Sam has made bad choices in his life. The details are personal so I will simply say that his path in life was a downhill one, not the successful one portrayed in the magazine. He is not a successful artist. He no longer has a high-paying career.
He's a very different person from the person portrayed in the magazine article. Reading it made me realize that as genealogists we should not rely on one article or one obituary to paint the full picture of an ancestor's life. These are all subjective views written at a specific moment in time. Take it with a grain of salt. Or at least recognize that it's only one small piece of a person's entire life.
4 comments:
Such a good reminder and an easy trap to fall into, especially in cases when there is little available about an individual.
I hadn't thought about this before, but of course it is perfectly true. I’m guilty of taking one piece of information and assuming the course of someone’s life was set. I must dig deeper in the future.
Thanks for the reminder Lorine
It will be an interesting job in the future for researchers to glean the truth about their ancestors from the plethora of articles in the media. Particularly high profile people, sorting the fact from fiction.
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