How Do you Prove your Ancestry?

Some Notes from 

https://bcgcertification.org/skillbuilding-evidence-revisited-dna-poe-and-gps/

A lineage, pedigree, or genealogy is a series of related assertions proved by a complex web of interwoven evidence. In weaving that web, we cite our sources and, when necessary for clarity, explain our evidence. We may have inadvertently chosen faulty materials or made a mistaken connection, but our goal is a portrait of the family that is as close to the true picture as possible.

Evidence is drawn from information in written records, oral testimony, and artifacts. Information is inert and impartial, until we use it to support an assertion about someone’s identity, relationship, biographical event, or circumstance. There are, of course, no “irrefutable” sources. Even a birth certificate may be mistaken in some of its details.

We measure the power of evidence—its convincing weight—by asking of it the following questions::

Are these sources generally accepted as reliable? 

Is the information itself coherent and free of obvious error? 

Was the data’s significance understood? 

Were its logical, physiological, psychological, social, legal, religious, ethnic, and historical contexts accurately reflected in the evidentiary conclusion?

Is the data being used as direct or indirect (circumstantial) evidence? 

Proof

Proof is dependent on the sum of our evidence. No single item, regardless of how reliable, well-interpreted, or direct, can stand alone in support of an assertion about a specific person.

Whatever the content of a genealogical statement, when we correlate and assemble a body of evidence in its support, we build a case for its validity.

Judgment about a proof’s power to convince depends on answers to another set of questions:

Was the search for relevant information thorough? 

Did it include all sources that a reasonably knowledgeable genealogist would expect of a competent search?

Is the evidence valid? 

Was the evidence assembled correctly? 

Does all the underlying data concern the same person, event, or relationship? Has it been faithfully portrayed, without distortion or significant omission?

Does the proof satisfactorily answer questions raised by (a) data that conflicts with the genealogical statement; and/or (b) information that might have been available in records that were never created or have been subsequently destroyed.

If the answers to these questions warrant our conviction that the statement is substantially true, it is said to be proved. That does not mean that it can never be disproved by additional data or more precise interpretation. It does mean that frivolous challenges, such as “but something else could have happened” or “The History of the M. Family (undocumented) says otherwise,” should not be viewed as sufficiently powerful to destroy our case.