I’ve spent most of the day going through and evaluating the various sources for my genealogical research. For some time now I’ve had in my possession two sheets of paper with birth and death information of members of the Womble family. The vital record information contained on these pieces of paper pertains to Albert and Mattie Womble and most of their children.
When I was taking the NGS Home Study Course I used these papers for one of my lessons and in the critique the grader suggested that I try to figure out who wrote this information. I studied the photocopies I had made of these pages off and on and couldn’t come to any real decision about them. Last year, while going through genealogical materials at my parents' house I asked if I could take these papers with me. My parents said I could take them. A couple months after bringing them home with me I looked at them and noticed written on one side the first sheet it said Family Record. I hadn’t noticed that when I photocopied it, so that’ll further hammer it home to you that you should definitely examine only original records because you could very well miss something important.
As I was going through them today and tallying the information with various Womble family members, I noticed for the second time how one section of the document, the one pertaining to the deaths of some of Albert and Mattie’s kids was written over with another writing implement. Looking at the original document, it appears to be fountain pen ink. I can still see penciled handwriting underneath the ink, but it made me wonder who did this? The person who wrote with the fountain pen also made small notations about birth dates for these children and one of these is written in what I consider to be a pretty modern format of month/day/year. Again, this made me think to myself who wrote this stuff? Why write over what someone else has written. It seemed pretty clear that the person writing with the fountain pen wasn’t trying to edit or change what was written since they seemed to be trying to write over the information in darker, more noticeable ink. At first I wasn’t that bothered by the fountain pen writing, but then I noticed writing in ink pen on the document as well and on the other side writing in green ink.
This really started to bug me, so I thought some more about who was responsible for basically defacing this document. Sure, whoever they were they thought they were doing the right thing by making the pencil writing clearer by writing over it in pen, but they were essentially obliterating the original author’s information by doing this. The document has been changed because of what they did and they’ve altered the integrity of the information.
I sat looking at the penciled handwriting knowing I’d seen this somewhere before. I have little memorandum notepads with this person’s handwriting inside. The original author of these sheets of paper was my great-grandfather, Albert Womble. I’m not sure if he recorded the birth and death events of his children as they happened or what, but he did write it down sometimes in varying degrees of neatness (sort of makes me see where I get my horrible penmanship from). Albert seems to have stopped recording birth information after his son Benjamin Smith Womble was born. I can only speculate as to why, perhaps he misplaced the papers after that. The birth information about his sons Jacob and Paul is written in a neater hand. This is still his handwriting and it’s neater and slightly different because he’s an older person than when he wrote the other children’s information.
On the opposite side of the paper is information about the wives and children’s deaths. Again this is written in slightly different handwriting, but it still looks like Albert’s just at a different stage in his life, probably before the later birth information on the previous side. What’s interesting is that Albert didn’t finish writing the death information for his 2nd wife, makes me wonder if he couldn’t remember when she died.
So now that the identity of the original author is taken care of I’m free to focus on who wrote over some of the death information with a fountain pen and ballpoint. I thought about this and found it interesting that Albert must have lost this document again after his 2nd wife died because the death of Joseph Womble is missing from this record. The good thing is that that the person wielding the fountain pen didn’t ever add that information to this document.
On the backside of the paper titled Family Record, is written the birth information for Albert and Mattie twice and their death information. The death information about Mattie that’s written with the fountain pen is wrong, and I see how this date got recorded incorrectly. Now, I’ve asked before on this blog how bad information gets disseminated, and in this particular family I’ve asked myself the question of who passed on this bad information? In both instances and probably by coincidence I come back to the same person. The information about Albert and Mattie’s births and death that’s written with a fountain pen uses what I called the slash format of writing dates. “I’ve got to find out who this person is,” I think to myself as I go through some of the other genealogical stuff I brought back from my parents’ house. I come across a notebook with masking tape holding together a handmade leather case that’s attempting to cover the notebook. On the masking tape is written in ballpoint pen information about Albert Womble’s father and grandfather. The handwriting is identical to the fountain pen writing. It’s my grandmother Virginia Womble Blickensderfer.
She probably came across these papers after her father Albert Womble died and decided to include her parents’ birth and death information and wasn’t thinking that about the genealogical and historical value of the document. She wrote down her dad’s birth and death info with her fountain pen and then started writing her mother’s vital data down too. However, she might not have remembered when her mother died. So she looked over the document and saw that her dad had written the information and either thought his 4 in the number 14 looked like a 9 so she wrote a 19 instead of 14, or she fixated on the number 19 because that was the day he died and wrote 19.
Then she looked over the other pages of the record and saw that her dad’s penciled handwriting was hard to read because it was fading and decided, “I’m going to fix this and make it more readable, so I’ll write with my pen over what Daddy wrote. It won’t hurt anything because I’ll write exactly what he wrote so long ago. Much later when she bought one of those new fangled ballpoint pens, did she happen to be looking over the document again and decided to write over one of her siblings’ death year that was originally written by her dad.
Yes, my grandmother doing this helped me to see what would be her dad’s extremely faded writing, but in the process she devalued the information her dad was trying to record for posterity. Take this as a lesson the next time you’re looking through some ancient family mementos, don’t ‘try’ to improve your long dead ancestors’ information by making is clearer. You should work to preserve the artifact by putting it in proper storage. If you want to try to ‘improve’ what they wrote write this information on another sheet of paper or take a digital photo of the item and then make notes on the digital photo. Don’t try to alter the past, ‘cause you just might be writing on what could’ve been the next Mona Lisa!
