Negative Evidence

Have you thought about the ‘negative evidence’ you’ve collected over time for a branch of your family tree? Do you have that evidence documented.

I’m currently taking a Your DNA Guide yDNA course. In that course, I’m part of a buddy group that has been meeting weekly via zoom. Last week, we were discussing our male line brick walls and our research. During that discussion, I happened to mention that I have a lot of ‘negative’ evidence’ for my Crawford line.

While thinking back on this conversation, I read Randy Seavers’ February 4th Best of Genea-Blogs post. On his list of ‘best posts’ that week was the post, What Is Negative Evidence in Genealogy by Mercedes Brons on Who Are You Made Of? Mercedes Brons’ post details just the type of ‘evidence’ I’ve used to rule out the various possible ancestors on the CRAWFORD branch of my tree.

However, that blog post also challenged us to document that negative evidence. While I don’t have such documentation attached to my Crawford branch, I do have several of these lines in my RootsMagic file with documentation to support them.

My written explanation of this negative evidence was first published on my (at that time) website in 1996. I was able to republish this explanation as a page on this blog titled, Untangling James Crawford. In addition, I have added a link to this page as a comment on the profile of my 4th great grandfather, James Crawford.

Hopefully, these efforts to share my research journey will help others with their Crawford research.