Questioning my assumptions

This past October, I wrote a post called Using a timeline to solve a problem. In it I reported how pleased I was that I could use a timeline to address a discrepancy between records I had seen that listed my great great grandparents’ wedding day as March 14, 1865 and those that listed it as May 14, 1865. I concluded, after taking into account the timeline and applying logic to the situation, that they must have been married in March, when my gggrandfather was on furlough from a “disabled camp” during the Civil War, rather than in May when records seemed to indicate that he was in a Union prison-of-war camp.

However, since that time, I sent away for records from the courthouse in Shelby County, Alabama, where they were married that spring. These handwritten records seem to clearly say May, not March. Even more compelling, it’s a chronological record and this one falls after a marriage that occurred in April. So it seems like my great great grandfather’s recollection was correct when he listed his marriage date as May 14 on the Alabama Census of Confederate Soldiers!

Perhaps he was paroled a couple weeks before the June 3 date listed in his records. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll never find out. But today, anyway, I’m going back to May 14 as the date in my records.

I’m certainly not discounting timelines as a viable way to analyze information. But what I am taking away from this is that I should avoid thinking of any problem solved, just because I reached what I think is a logical conclusion. I imagine this lesson will come back to me on more than one occasion as I do genealogy research!