Birthdates

I received an email concerning a Tapscott birthdate from a death record, which disagreed with dates from censuses and a cemetery marker. I replied with the following (slightly modified).

Ages and dates of birth on death records are always suspect and are often incorrect. The person who best knew the age or birthdate is dead. The record is often filled out by a busy county clerk who does not know the deceased at all using information provided by a physician, coroner, or acquaintance who does not know the deceased well. Even when a family member provides the information, it is often a child or, worse, a grandchild, taking on the job to avoid bothering a grieving (or doddering) widow or widower. When I was a young man I had no idea of my mother’s age, and certainly not my grandmother’s. And I could have easily been off by a decade were I to have provided the age of our next door neighbor. You would be shocked to see the number of outlandish ages (and other “facts”) provided on death records by children, grandchildren, acquaintances, and professionals. And county clerks, physicians, and coroners, are always in a hurry to take care of a death record so they can get on to their next (and for physicians, primary) task. With the possible exception of marriage records, where outright lying often occurs for a variety of reasons, death records seem to be the most likely of any record type to be mistaken on age or birthdate, though, of course, they are the most likely to be correct on date of death..

Samuel Chichester Tapscott's error-filled marker.

 Cemetery markers are usually much more reliable than death records for birthdates since inscriptions are often the combined efforts of several family members who can consult one another and who are not rushed to provide information. Grave markers are not usually erected immediately and no one wants to make a mistake carved in inerasable stone. Undertakers and cemetery monument salespeople do their best to calm grieving family members (after all, they are trying to please customers) and to allow time to make decisions about personal data for inscriptions, obituaries, memorials, etc. By no means are grave markers always correct, particularly when erected years after a death or in the absence of living family members, but they are relatively trustworthy.  [One example of an egregiously wrong marker is Samuel Chichester Tapscott’s stone in St. Mary’s White Chapel Church Cemetery, Lancaster County, Virginia, a marker off by ten years or so in the birth year and by a year or so in the death date (Henry the Immigrant, Ed. 2, pp. 245 – 247). Was the stone erected years after the death? Was the stonemason drunk? Who knows.]

 The reliabilities of Census ages probably lie somewhere between the reliabilities from death certificates and those from cemetery markers. People for whom ages are provided are normally living, but they are not always the ones giving the information. It is often provided by other household members and sometimes even neighbors. Even when providing census information for themselves, people accidentally give the wrong age (an error increasing with increasing age). And a surprising number of individuals lie or at least fudge the truth. But consistency between several censuses greatly increases credibility.

Best of all, of course, are official birth records, though these are very often unavailable and can also be wrong. My mother's official birth record misspelled her name, and my father's did the same for his name. But at least the dates appear to be correct.