How to guess which person is the same (or maybe it's wiser to not guess at all)
Hi, I wonder what's the best way to "guess" if two persons with the same name are actually the same person.
For example, I have several people in my family tree where a marriage document doesn't give someone's birth place or the name of the their parents. In that case, I search for people with the same name, with the approximate correct age (based on the marriage document, although the exact age seems to be a bit unreliable). And of course I check for the religion, because usually catholics marry catholics etcetera.
If I find several people with the same name, roughly the expected birth year and the expected religion, I check where they were born and how far that is from the place they would later get married. If it's very close, for example, a village less than 10 km away from the other village, it feels like a fair guess that this is the same person. (Even though it's not 100% sure...)
But now I have a situation where two people with the same name were born very close to the location of the marriage.
(There were even more people with the same name in the same time, but I've excluded people who were born 100 km away... Again, not 100% sure, but I think it's a fair guess.)
To make my example concrete, I'm looking for Marianna Sarnowska, who married in Pruppendorf in 1809. (The document is listed for Notzendorf, which is next to Pruppendorf.)
https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:6ZMN-LFNK
(The witnesses of the marriage have different last names, so they probably weren't family.)
I'm trying to figure out if one of the following two Marianna Sarnowskas is the same person from the marriage:
Option 1, born in 1783, about 6 years older than the marriage document suggests:
https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:6FYL-LD5L
Parents: Casimirus Sarnowski and Catharina Wychmanowna
The document doesn't give a precise birth location, but other documents show that these parents had other children while living in Piaskow, which I think means Piaski/Sandhof next to Marienburg (not sure). This is about 10 km west of Pruppendorf.
Option 2, born in 1791, about 2 years younger than the marriage document suggests:
https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:6ZMF-1F4Q
Parents: Michael Sarnowski and Regina Fochsin
Location reads something like "Somerauerfeld" which probably means Sommerau, which is less than 10 km north/northeast of Pruppendorf.
(Interestingly, Michael Sarnowski had several children with a Regina with a different name, who might or might not be the same person. But that's a different puzzle.)
What would you do in such situations?
Is there a way to make an educated guess about which Marianna Sarnowska is the same person?
Or should I just conclude that it's impossible to know this, unless more information pops up somewhere?
(Just trying to understand how others do this. I'm a bit new to this genealogical research. I find it very interesting, but at the same time very difficult and sometimes even hopeless because it's constantly about deciding the plausibility that information can be connected or not.)
Best Answers
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The quick answer is to develop strategies and follow them. Of course, none may pan out and that just makes life difficult. BUT here are suggestions.
- Research the deaths of the two Michael Sarnowskis, pile up as many documents as you can, and then try to work backwards. Use wills, land deeds, newspapers, census records, and any other records available. It appears these people did not live in the US, so I am not sure what type of records are available. Also research their widows if the wives outlived the men. Look for clues and then begin to work backwards in time towards those marriage records you have. Again, pile up all records you find, even if you think they are useless. Like pieces of a puzzle, several records together may prove solid information.
- Start with the marriages and research all the children of each couple. Again, leave no stone unturned. Document the entire lives of all children as much as possible through marriage and their deaths.
- Research who the 2 sets of parents of the Michael Sarnowskis might be. Research them and all their children, looking for clues.
I have 3 male cousins born in the 1820s and 30s of the same name, living in the same town and sorting them out is nearly impossible. Strategies #1 and #2 have not worked for me other than I have nicely documented lives of 3 sets of couples and their children (and each of them continued the ridiculous tradition of having a son with their given name). I am in the process of working through #3, and so far it has separated one of the individuals, I'm pleased to say.
Good luck!
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The answer to the "which one?" question may very well be "neither". Most weddings took place in the bride's place of residence, since it was generally her father paying for the party.
In addition to Gail's excellent advice, a few pointers more specific to Europe:
The choice of church wasn't random. Consult a gazetteer to find out where the residents of a particular village were obligated to have their vital events recorded. Gazetteers can also tell you the different names for a place, and the more completionist ones will also list things like named settlements or farms that belonged administratively to a particular place. Also check historical maps to see where the roads were at the time. Distance "as the crow flies" is much less relevant than actual traveling distance.
Always consider the possibility of unindexed records, as well as badly misindexed ones. Also, don't trust FamilySearch's placename fields in indexes. The autostandardization bot has badly corrupted the entire database, and many indexed collections have overcompensated for the errors: instead of (mis)identifying the town, the "event place" fields now just stop at the country. This means that if you try to use the place fields or filters in Search - Records, you may very well be missing the entries you're looking for.
As a workaround for FS's placename difficulties, you can use the Catalog, although it introduces an increasing number of obstacles. The latest one is the disimproved place search algorithm. (It still can't find Viennese records, for example.) You can try using the keyword field to work around that problem with the workaround. Another obstacle is that the catalog is now noticeably stale, because it hasn't been updated in three years (and apparently isn't planned to be refreshed any time soon). This means that the access symbols may be inaccurate: there may now be an index associated with some of the images on a previously-unindexed film, for example. A third possible obstacle is that many index entries have had extra characters added to the field with the image group or film number, and the search algorithm for that field doesn't necessarily consider "008017823_001_M99M-FG6" to be a match to "8017823". (They do seem to have loosened things slightly, though.)
With those caveats in mind, you can use film numbers to narrow your results, and then search by just given names, for example. (I find that those are somewhat less likely to be completely misread by indexers, probably because there were a lot fewer of them in use than there were surnames.)
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