When Abstracts are Wrong

Dec 1, 2020

My awesome cousin brought this example to me, and it’s a great one to show how abstracts can have misinformation. With abstracts, information is extracted and summarized (usually by a computer algorithm). You may see them on database sites like FamilySearch.org or Ancestry.com when you click on a promising record like a census. The abstract will show you the names of the head of house and their family members, ages, occupations, and so on.

This is similar to transcriptions in which information is copied, usually by hand, to the best representation possible. Both abstracts and transcriptions allow room for errors and should not be given as much weight as the original source (see Types of Sources).

An abstract of an 1861 Census of Canada courtesy of Ancestry.com

A first glance at the abstract looks like our subject, Judith Cook (misspelled in the census as “Judath”) is Native American. Let’s open the census and examine closer.

Above: selection from the 1861 Census of Canada, New Brunswick, Westmorland, courtesy of Ancestry.com, with “native” circled in red.

The census shows Judath Cook (or rather “do” as short for “ditto” meaning the same as above, which is “Cook” in this scenario) below her husband, Samuel Cook. The header is out of sight in this selection, but the column to the right reads “Race and where born”. Here it says “Nova Scotia” for Samuel Cook, and “native” for his wife.

We can assume that one of Ancestry.com’s algorithms picked up “native” in a column for race and calculated her ethnicity to be Native American in the abstract. However, if the answer for her husband is related to the place (Nova Scotia), it’s more likely that in this case, native means native to the area, as in born in New Brunswick.

We can confirm this by looking up information about the 1861 Census of Canada. On the Library and Archives Canada page for this census we find the following disclaimer: “In the 1861 census of New Brunswick, “Native” meant born in that province, not Aboriginal.”

We can now come to the logical conclusion that the abstract is incorrect, Judith Cook’s race is undetermined from this census, and that she is native to New Brunswick.

Other sources may show her race, and we may come to discover later that she is Native American, but this specific source does not show this.

Long story short, be careful with abstracts!