Is a Judge’s Word Binding?
Judge Wolfe (far right) and family
In 1911, my great-great-uncle, Judge Patrick B. Wolfe, published in two volumes Wolfe’s History of Clinton County. In the tradition of this sort of local history, which had become popular during the centennial celebration of 1876, his book provides background on the politics, geography, education, and religion of Clinton County, Iowa. The better part of the book’s nearly twelve hundred pages, however, is devoted to people—to biographical sketches “of representative citizens of this county whose records deserve preservation because of their worth, effort and accomplishment.” These include at least one woman—too often in genealogy the women are way in the background—and three members of the Wolfe family, including the Judge himself. His entry is notable less for what it says about its subject than it is for its remarkable thumbnail sketch of the Judge’s father, which is to say my great-great-grandfather John R. Wolfe. For most of my life, these couple paragraphs amounted to everything we knew about the man.
And so much of it … is not quite right!
From this snippet of biography we spun grand tales of revolution (Young Ireland rose up in 1848), of life on the run, and of redemption claimed from the black soil of far-off Iowa. But the more research we did on our own, the more problems we found.
For instance, why does John R. Wolfe’s gravestone say he was born in 1809, not 1824? And passenger lists show that he and his family left Ireland in 1847, not 1848. Is this just a bad case of memory on the Judge’s part?
Once I began to learn the tools of genealogy, I could check the church records for myself. That’s when I discovered that Wolfe was not born in 1824 or 1809, but in 1813—baptized on July 3, to be precise.
This makes sense because his age on the immigration passenger list is thirty-five, suggesting a birth year of 1812 or 1813. And yet, even what appears to be a solid fact only leads to more questions: Where did those other two birth years come from? And do mistakes like these mean that everything else is suspect, too?
I think it’s fair to say that just about everything in genealogy is, or ought to be, suspect—at least at first. At least until you can verify it or corroborate it somehow. You shouldn’t even take a judge’s word for it.
Still, you can’t dismiss everything, and just this weekend I stumbled upon records that back up part of John R. Wolfe’s biography. I’ll explain in the next post.
Learn more about how Black Sheep can help tell your family’s story.