As in any other walk of life, there are certain things that aren’t exactly what they seem to be, yet we, in our knowledge seem to want to assume that it’s a certain way.

In the beginning of my genealogy I made an assumption that cost me a great deal of time and work, and since then I’ve made it a point to not make assumptions.

My husbands great grandparents were gone and we were working with finding their parents. His grandmother was listed on the marriage certificate as Pet Roger, while the grandfather was listed as Rodger.

I simply assumed that they had mistakenly put her married name onto the marriage certificate and misspelled it as so often happened with families in that small community.

In reality as it turned out, her maiden name was Roger, and she had been possessed of nearly the same name prior to her marriage. By making an assumption about the paperwork I was looking at, rather than taking it a step further and asking someone in the family, I spent two days searching for documents to help me to find out what her maiden name had “really” been.

That can be chalked up to youth and inexperience in what I was doing, but in many cases, even those of us who have more experience in genealogy find ourselves making errors of assumption that we shouldn’t, and that cost us time in the end.

There are several things we should never assume, among them:

• Never assume that since you can’t find the record of the marriage, that the children were not legitimate or that no marriage took place. Not all marriages were documented. Particularly in Midwest America, marriages were done by a traveling minister in many cases, who may or may not have made it back to file the documents. The marriage may have been misfiled, or it may have taken place in a small community, whose records were lost or destroyed.
  Additionally, many areas for a period of time recognized common law marriage as legal marriage since there were not ministers available to make those bonds legal in any other way.
• Don’t assume that just because a man is documented as being married to this or that woman, or that because she is his widow, she was also the mother of his children. Especially in early America, it wasn’t uncommon for a woman to pass away in childbirth, so in many cases, not all of the children in a particular house were children of the same mother.
  One thing we should never assume to be true is parentage, until we’ve proven it.
• If one of your ancestors is named Junior, he may or may not be named the same thing as his father and assuming that he was can sometimes lead us off track. Sometimes another relative bore the same name and he was simply called Junior as a nickname to keep him straight from the other relative.
  If you assume that the fathers name is the same and go seeking him with that value in your mind, you’re going to have issues finding him.
• Very often women were given the same name as their mother, in the same fashion as boys were named after their fathers. Assuming that it was the same person and not digging deeper to find birth records or other items to show us the difference in the date of birth can be a costly mistake in terms of time spent.
• Two or three men who are closely aligned geographically, who share the same last name and are close to the same age, are not necessarily siblings.
  It’s a common assumption and in some cases its even understandable, but the boys could be cousins, could be second cousins, could simply be neighbors with the same name. This was very common when a great many members of one ethnic group, such as the Norwegians in Nebraska and Minnesota settled in close confines. Look for other evidence of a relationship such as closeness of the homes or the father or mothers names.
• Even the same naming pattern does not indicated that someone is family .In many cases, again like ethnic groups will bring about someone with the exact same name living in the same community at the same time and it does make it difficult to discern the person you are seeking particularly if they are close in age.
  In my own community there are 17 women who have exactly the same name that I do. Thank heaven for social security numbers.
• Don’t assume that just because your great grandfather was born and died in the same town that he never moved or was located anywhere else. If you do so you likely won’t check further and may miss some key evidence.
  Many people were born, moved around repeatedly and then returned to their home when they grew older.
  My own grandfather moved from a home in the hills of West Virginia, spent several years in France, and in Germany, prior to moving back home to hill country in the United States before he died.
  This was also common with the pioneers, who may have spent their life traveling, only to decide at the end of it that they wanted to be back where they had roots.
• Boys names and girls names were very often interchangeable. Kimberly was once the name used for boys only, while Jens is a male name in many countries.
  Don’t assume that just because a name is male or female, the person corresponds to that name.
  Quite often they don’t.