Now that I'm deep in the midst of deciphering handwritten documents in Polish, German, and even Latin in search of my second great-grandparents' collateral lines, a thought occurred to me. It was a thought I didn't appreciate thinking at the time, but it does serve as a reminder when considering the possibility of errors in records as I face my current research dilemma.
I had been following one collateral line, going through birth, marriage, and—eventually—death records, when I spotted a name I knew couldn't be right. It was in the death record for a child of my second great-grandparent's sibling, where the mother's name was provided. The mother's given name was correct (remember, I had already found this family's details in other documents) but the maiden name written on the document could not have the right one—not if this were the same family I had been researching all along. In fact, it was a surname associated by marriage to totally different branch of the family.
Did the reporting party, under the stress of losing a loved one, suddenly blurt out the wrong maiden name? I've certainly seen this happen in death certificates written up in English in my own country, but this time I was deciphering records from old Prussia—in a foreign language, no less. Can I assume that oft-spotted error in my own country's English-language documents could have revealed a bit of universal human nature? Perhaps death records in other languages contain the same—totally understandable—error, too. My dilemma, though, is how to determine when such an error would be likely, even when stumbling through a foreign language in another country's death records.
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