In my last post, I discussed the importance of stepping away from your research when you encounter a brick wall, as well the importance of changing your perspective once you have decided to revisit the problem. Perhaps this post is pretty much just a reiteration of the latter statement, but its significance bears repeating. When you become absolutely fixated on the details of your problem, you are not seeing the whole picture. Viewing your issue through such a limited scope also means you become blind to alternative possibilities.
I have always thought of myself as a reasonable, logical, and relatively intelligent person who bases her conclusions on the evidence that is presented. However, I recently stumbled upon a court record that had me questioning whether my ancestor . . . this is embarrassing. . . had faked his own death. My brain jumped to a most unlikely conclusion because I was so blinded by what I thought I knew about him. After all, I had spent twenty years researching him, his wives, his children, and his whole extended family, so I would know, right?
The handful of facts I had gleaned over the years cemented how I viewed Daniel in my head. I knew he had been born in Maryland circa 1811. I knew he’d been married three times. I knew he’d had kids with all three wives. I knew that two of those wives disappeared along with four of his children. I knew he most likely died between 1872 & 1876. I wrote a whole post about it, for Pete’s sake!
Then I found the guardianship record, and as I read it, I became confused. 1851 . . . Daniel Burrell . . . deceased. I read it several times becoming increasingly confused. Daniel died in 1851? No. He didn’t. He had left Ohio—probably around 1860–and came to Michigan. He came to Michigan and married Polly Baker. He and Polly had five children together. There were no alternative possibilities to be found here. There just weren’t.
However, this new information did not jibe with the information I had known for twenty years. And the only possible scenario my brain could conjure was that he had faked his death in Ohio before coming to Michigan because I knew the facts. While it was late at night by this point, I cannot entirely blame my lapse in logic on the hour. I woke up the next morning still reeling from that damn court document and still not knowing what to make of it.
I decided to blog about it. I needed to get my thoughts sorted out and writing always seems to do the trick. Sure enough, as I began explaining the situation to my non-existent readers, an alternative possibility finally began to emerge: there were two Daniels. There were TWO Daniels! One Daniel had died and the other Daniel, my second great-grandfather, had lived.
The reality of this situation seems so obvious in retrospect. How could I have been so foolish as to entertain the possibility of a man faking his death? Regardless, I have learned my lesson. And I am hoping you can learn from my lesson, too (and have a chuckle at my idiocy). While the facts I had known for years pointed to only one Daniel, new facts emerged that challenged what I thought I knew, and I was not prepared for that.
And we must be prepared to have our perceptions shattered like this. After all, the few facts that we gather on an ancestor are just the tip of the iceberg. What lies beneath is so much more than we can ever know. In my case, the 1830-1850 census records listed only one Daniel; that was just the very tip of the iceberg. Then I found the guardianship record, and a bit more was revealed. Lord knows what the full story is, but you can bet I’ll keep searching. I just hope that next time I’m ready for what I find.
May we all learn to expect the unexpected, accept the alternative possibilities, roll with the punches . . . and laugh at ourselves when we do something stupid.