If you find an image of a historical document that supports your family research in a book or posted online, do you ever think about whether it might have been altered from the original?
I recently found an image in a book that perfectly illustrates why we should all thoroughly investigate any such images before using them for our family trees even if there is a citation or source listed…but especially if there isn’t.
Why?
The image below had a caption saying it was a record of the Sunbury Baptist Church in Liberty County, Georgia.
This is not a record from the Sunbury Baptist Church. It is an image created by merging pieces of three records of the Midway Congregational Church in Liberty County, which are online on Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org.
Not only that, but the date of the session was changed, and some of the original names were changed, which would appear to provide evidence for a family narrative that may or may not be true. This act also erases the lives of the people originally named.
I blurred the caption and the title because I don’t know how this altered image came to exist and I don’t want to appear to be accusing anyone falsely. (I have tried several different ways to contact the person who put it in the book but without success. I would welcome their help to figure out where the image originally came from.)
How do I know this image has been altered? I have read through every page of the Midway Church quarterly session records created between 1754 and 1867 in order to create a database of references to its African American members. So I recognized the format and also the name of the pastor. The Midway Church was Congregational but had mostly Presbyterian pastors, including Reverend Robert Quarterman, mentioned in this record.
If records of the Sunbury Baptist Church have survived, I’m not aware of them, but would love to find out they do.
Here’s an educated guess at how this altered image was constructed. It is not difficult to do. After you read the explanation below, I hope you will be very aware of how easy it is to create such a record.
The header of the altered image is from an original May 25, 1833 Midway Church quarterly session. Notice that the body of that original record (on the left) does not match the altered image.
Want to verify this? See the original Midway Church May 25, 1833 session image at FamilySearch.
That is because that header was pasted over the header for the original August 20, 1842, Midway Church (not Sunbury Baptist Church) session.
Want to verify this? See the original Midway Church August 20, 1842, session image at FamilySearch
Notice that the original August 20, 1842, session record (on the left above) shows the woman’s name under David as Harriet, and the enslavers as Abiel Winn, not William Spencer and John Anderson.
Here’s how that change could have been made.
Because this was a Liberty County record and I have posted so many abstracts of Liberty County records on my website, TheyHadNames.net, all it would take would be a simple search of the Midway Church records on that site for mentions of William Spencer and John Anderson.
Since all records have citations on TheyHadNames.net, John Anderson’s name in a February 27, 1847, session record would be easily found online at FamilySearch. It’s simple these days to “snip” John Anderson’s name from the original record, and use that to “paste” over Abiel Winn’s name.
Want to verify this? See the original Midway Church session record from February 27, 1847 at FamilySearch.
The same was likely done with William Spencer, and to replace the name Harriet with the name Louisa…an erasure of Harriet’s identity for her descendants.
Again, a comparison of the August 20, 1842 record with the image in the book, showing the changes.
For as long as people have been “doing genealogy,” there have been people whose desire to prove a certain lineage has overpowered their integrity. Others may pick up that mistaken or fraudulent information completely innocently and include it in their own work, thus perpetuating it. Modern technology makes it easier to create such images and spread them, but even in the past, a simple photocopy machine could easily be used to insert a piece of one document into another.
Do your own research…always.
This image by itself is an important reminder of the need to verify for yourself every document you find, but here’s another example. Click here to see it.