Acceptable Sources for Updates to GLS System


By Chris Mills

Acceptable sources to add information to genealogical or memorial pages are any of the following:

State death indexes or the social security death indexes, death certificates, verbal or written contact with a cemetery or funeral home representative, cemetery websites, census records, immigration and naturalization records, family bibles, obituaries, other published death records, biographical writeups in local or family history books or pamphlets, or any other written or published source.

"Personal knowledge" is acceptable but will be given the least weight of any kind of source and if contradicted by other records will almost certainly be changed or removed.

Take any information you find on family trees on Ancestry.com with a grain of salt, if the tree is unsourced there is very likely to be incomplete or incorrect information when it comes to birth and death dates. In many cases a tree will list a death date as After (year) and when that tree is copied to someone else's tree the "After" is dropped and the death date is changed to the year only, which was not what the original tree showed.

Please note that if there are discrepancies between different sources we will use what makes the most sense to us. For example, since there is a known bug in many 1900 births for people who are listed in the California Death Index, if the CADI shows a birth as 1901 and the Social Security Death Index shows it as 1900, we will ALWAYS use the 1900 date from the SSDI. Given the pervasive nature of the 1900 birth year bug in the CADI (it very possibly was wrong in literally hundreds of thousands of death records), we are liable to accept a change from a 1901 birth year to a 1900 birth year with no other proof or source if the 1901 date came from the CADI.

Grave markers are also a source, but do be aware of this: If a marker shows a birth or death year and the written records we have access to show a birth or death date very close to the date recorded on the marker but in a different year (i.e., a birth where written records show a date of 25 Dec 1905 and the marker shows simply 1906), we will NOT change the page to reflect the date, the year on the marker in that case is almost certainly an error because the exact date of the deceased was not known at the time the marker was ordered. If we showed a date of 25 Dec 1905 and the marker showed a birth year of 1907 instead we would look at it in that case and research it if possible to try and determine the correct date.

There are errors in dates on a significant number of grave markers, I personally have found markers where birth years were transposed on the marker, in one case a man who was born in 1924 was listed as being born in 1942 (in spite of the "World War II" veteran designation on his marker) and in another case a man who was born in 1894 had a marker which showed he was born in 1948. Oddly enough, there are also errors on death years, although not as often. I have seen errors in quite a few cases where the death year was off by a year or so, although I have rarely seen errors of more than a year.

Census records are not a source for exact birth dates, although the 1900 census in many cases gives you a birth month and year. You should be aware that in many cases the birth year in the 1900 census was adjusted up or down in order to make the person's age come out correctly for the census, which seems nonsensical but all kinds of strange instructions were given to the census takers.

You can copy and paste information from the records you are looking at into any emails you send us to update pages, or attach an image file to your email if your source is a graphic file and not a text based format.

Also, if you see a middle name on a woman's marker, that in and of itself is not sufficient evidence that it was her maiden name. In many cases a surname-like middle name on a woman's marker is actually a first husband's surname, not a maiden name. The marker is NOT proof for changing a middle name to a maiden name. In many other cases it isn't even a prior married name, it is just a family name that was given to the woman when she was born.


Page created 25 August 2015

Online resources (free unless otherwise noted):

California Death Index 1940-1997 on Rootsweb
Ancestry.com Social Security Death Index (subscription required)
Other California Death Index Links on Chris's website (includes death indexes prior to 1940)
Regional Genealogy Links on Chris's website (includes links to other state death indexes such as Illinois and Missouri

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© 2015 by Chris Mills