He Said, She Said

Asking grandpa to tell you stories about great-grandma can yield a wealth of information. Those stories can be an excellent way to learn about your family's history, but they can also be the means by which somebody is unfairly described. Always beware of bias!

Feelings, opinions and impressions are inherently part of any relationship. Human experience brings a certain level of bias, which throughout history has impacted the way we view various events and people. Certainly, that bias can be positive, but even positive bias can alter one's view of things as they really are or were. Facts can be inflamed and details embellished. A negative bias has the opposite effect leading to missing context and sparse information.

While considering making a purchase of an item online, many of us look at customer reviews. Why? Perhaps they can tell us something we don't know. If we only read one bad review of a product and assume that one opinion is representative of the majority, we risk missing out on a great product. Let's be honest, there's always one bad apple in the bunch. If that item has 100 reviews, but there are only one or two negative reviews among them, odds are high that this is a product worth considering. Perhaps the negative reviews came as a result of a mistake in production or perhaps they came from people who are hard to please or who may have had unrealistic expectations.

While it'd be quite rare to have 100 people provide detail about the relationships they had with your ancestors, this principal of weighing opinion is similar. Taking one person's description and/or opinion about an ancestor is helpful, but it is not sufficient in determining what kind of person they really were. If multiple people were interviewed about Great-Grandma so and so they'd all be describing their feelings and impressions based on the type of relationship they had with her. A grandchild may offer a different description than a sibling would, for example. If detail is consistent across multiple accounts, that information tends to gain more credibility. When it is not, we may be able to determine why. Gathering information from newspaper articles, journals, letters, wills, biographies, court records, and more can help to make sense of these discrepancies.

If we knew that a bad review for the product we're thinking of purchasing actually came from a bitter competitor or from a person who is never pleased with anything, it'd be very easy to decide that this review shouldn't affect our own opinions. The same is true with family we never knew in life. When all we know about an ancestor is what we've been told by one person, perhaps further research can help us sift out any bias to see them more clearly. With further research and added context, we can sometimes uncover details to give us a clearer picture of things and people as they really were. Certainly, mistakes can be made if we simply judge a person or situation solely based on what one person has said.