The Need for Primary Sources

What is a primary source

A primary source is a source that has independent knowledge of an event. It is usually contemporary, first-hand, or official government records. It is not a book that looked up something elsewhere to report it to you, it is the thing that was looked up, that knew of an event without relying on another sources.

The meaning of primary is often misinterpreted to mean original, and of course, the ultimate source would be an original, primary document. But there is a big fall-off in reliability in facts not supported by reference to a primary source. And since accessing an original record is often difficult or impossible, just a reference to a primary source seems to be a boundary that provides the most reliability without making fact checking too difficult.

One must be careful with index entries and abstracts, as the compiler made some choices and possibly assumptions to make the primary record fit their presentation goals. Often, as in most published vital records, the index entry is nearly as good as the original, or better since the compiler may have expertise and familiarity with reading older writing, and may have had access to both original, town copies and church copies to build their entry. But sometimes index entries are done by amateur volunteers who may not have the training to transmit the data accurately, or forced into a format that loses much of the information they contain.

Sources that pass on information discovered elsewhere are secondary sources.

Why are primary sources important

When a fact is presented, one always wonders, "How do they know that?" They did not live when the subject did, so they must have found this somewhere and are just reporting it. Perhaps they did good research, consulting multiple primary sources to build a cohesive picture. Perhaps they merely repeated what they found in one easily accessible source, who may have just repeated what they found, ad naseum, and the best case is that they all copied their data correctly and completely. Perhaps they applied a fact to the wrong person. Perhaps they even massaged conflicting data to fit their assumption of what is real.

When something is presented that disagrees with your own research, you try to verify the sources and decide which is most reliable and authoritative. Any primary source tends to carry more authority than any secondary source. Of course, all human endeavor is subject to errors, so even primary sources are not perfect, but it usually requires finding other primary sources, or more original copies of the specified primary source, to refute a primary source.

Using secondary sources

Many people find a book and they simply copy everything in it. Whole lineages have been entered into WeRelate simply based on what is presented in one secondary source. Some secondary sources may even have a focus, such as the genealogy of one family, or the genealogy of one town, that can make them highly reliable. However, this is not proof. It is accepted conditionally out of professional courtesy, a jumping off point from which to extend one's knowledge. But the real job is to identify the primary sources that inform each fact presented. Fortunately, modern genealogy is much more academic than past practices, often attaching footnotes to each fact that identify sources. But when a secondary source doesn't identify its primary sources, then it can't be used a proof. In that case, finding and identifying the primary sources, not adding yet another copy of the unproven assertions, represents the real advancement to genealogy.

There are many cases where facts are presented in numerous secondary sources, and can all be traced back to a single secondary source that does not say how the information is known. When people can't find a primary answer on their own, they tend to accept whatever secondary answer that makes sense to them. But it is important to remember that repeating an unproven fact does not make it more likely to be true. Perhaps the information is legitimate, it may come from a hard-to-access source, like a family Bible, or a source unknown to the poster. In this case, it is a great service to the community to find, cite and perhaps provide a transcript of the hard-to-find source. But often this situation turns out to be a long series of copied facts, that originate with a mistake or assumption. This is how the originator was able to provide an answer when no one else can find anything. The inability to locate a primary source forces the data (even if completely consistent with all known facts) to be considered traditional, but unproven. Merely asserting something cannot make it true, that requires a primary source.