Birth Details Found In Death Records Are Not Always Accurate

Post date: Mar 17, 2015 12:32:39 AM

All too often, I have heard that a client cannot find the birth record for an ancestor, in spite of the fact that they have an exact date and place of birth from a death record for that individual.

It is important to understand that the information contained in death records is not obtained from the deceased, but rather, from an informant who may or may not have all of the facts correct.

The most recent episode of Who Do You Think They Are? – Josh Groban (season 6, episode 2) which aired 15 March 2015 contained a good example of this.

Merrill Willis JOHNSON was Josh Groban’s great-grandfather. If you were to pull the death record for Merrill Willis, you would find that the record identifies his date of birth as having been 6 July 1881. In spite of this, the tree shown on air displayed the date 6 July 1882. So, which one is correct?

It is no surprise that the date of death for Merrill Willis JOHNSON that the genealogist had in the tree was the correct date. I have confirmed this by identifying his birth record. This means that the date in the death record was incorrect. This is a good opportunity to discuss the fact that vital records may not always be correct.

The further one gets from the event in question, the more inaccurate a record can tend to be. A birth record will likely have the most accurate information relating to the birth of an individual. Subsequent draft registrations will have the potential to be a little less accurate, and census data less accurate still. In this case, the final record, the death record, is definitely off by a year. This is only a slight deviation. In other cases, the deviation can be far more significant, changing the day, month, and year of birth.

To understand why this can occur, it is important to understand that the date of birth on Merrill Willis’s death record was not obtained first-hand (it was not obtained from Merrill Willis JOHNSON himself, as that would truly have been a neat trick!).

It is important not to become fixated on a date of birth obtained from a record long after the actual birth date. If one were looking for a birth record for Merrill Willis JOHNSON in 1881, it would not be found.

As long as we are discussing this episode, it might be worth discussing an interaction between John Groban and a genealogist on screen.

Josh Groban asks: “So, my grandfather “Lee”, his name was actually “Merril Lee JOHNSTON”?

To which the genealogist responded: “yup”.

This shouldn't distract from what was overall, a great episode, nor is it relevant to the rest of the research discussed during the episode, but it might be worth noting that Josh’s grandfather’s name was likely born Merrill Leander JOHNSON, and that he appears to have obtained the first part of his given name, “Merrill”, from his father, and the second part of his given name, “Leander”, from his mother’s father. Merril Lee JOHNSTON was enumerated in the 1910 US Federal Census as “Leander M Johnson”. His mother’s father’s name had been Leander WINSLOW.

Had the episode pursued this line of Josh Groban's tree, this clarification might have been helpful.