Mistakes Can Happen

In doing research I have come across some impossibilities that keep on getting passed down, mainly because people don't look closely at what they find and copy the information without really checking everything out about it. Take the record of Isaac Cole. Isaac was born in Rockland Co., NY and christened on 3 Nov 1779 in Tappan, Rockland, NY. It also states that he died 16 Jul 1855. He was the son of Isaac Abrahan Cole/Kool and Catherine Severns according to this record I found. Under marriages it says his spouse was Anna Vickey and they were married Nov 20, 1860. Now some people are going to take this record and copy it verbatim without looking at the information and seeing the fault with it. If he died in 1855, they couldn't be married in 1860 unless you are writing a sci-fi novel or making a movie where the corpse is kept around so someone could inherit or something. Yuk! Now if the mistake was just in a misprint of the date, say the marriage date should be 1760 instead, it still seems like it would be wrong since Isaac wasn't christened until 1779. The problem here is that there is no birth date listed. Most family's had their children christened shortly after birth so they take the christening date to represent the birth date of the child when a birth date can't be found. But, what if, for some reason Isaac didn't get christened shortly after birth and was christened years later. Here's where more research is demanded. You would have to find the parents, and siblings to see if that would be plausible according to the dates of birth or christenings of each of them. I have a whole family listing the births/christenings and death dates of each of Isaac's siblings and they all died in the 1800's, including Isaac, and his sister Sarah was the last to die in 1863. Some have birthdates and some have christening dates and some have both, so it seems likely that the marriage between Isaac and Anna Vickey never happened, at least not on that date of 20 Nov 1860. Read carefully every piece of information you find before incorporating it into your own tree, because a mistake like this could cause numerous problems for you later on. Now then, here is a plausible explanation, but may not be true either. Isaac Cole/Kool may not be the right one. There could be another Isaac Cole/Kool out there who did marry Anna Vickey on 20 Nov 1860, just not this Isaac Cole/Kool, son of Isaac Abraham and Catherine Severns Cole/Kool. Have fun researching.

Update to this story: There is another record submitted that has Isaac Cole and Anna Vickery married on 20 November in 'wait for it', 1800. Aha, someone mis-wrote the year, probably because older records are sometimes very hard to read or faded out or just illegible to our eyes. Make sure your dates always make sense. Another mistake was the spouse's surname spelling. In one record it was Vickey and in the other, the correct dated one, it was Vickery. I have come across records where a given name for a child changed every ten years during the census taking. Because some parents gave 3 or 4 names for a given name of a child like this one - Sophia Margareta Anna. This woman every ten years was listed by something different but her date of birth/age always matched so I knew it was the same person in the same family. At the later census' she was called Anna because she named her girl child Sophia Margaret. Happy hunting.