Anthony wrote:
On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 7:58 PM, James Hare wrote
You could phrase it like this:
"The SSDI says 1904[source] while all these other publications say
1918[source]." Or you could discredit the reliability of the sources (which
would be the right thing to do, since the SSDI is not likely to get birth
dates wrong) and just say "Dixon was born in 1904.[source]"
SSDI might very well be wrong. It's worth mentioning, but shouldn't
be
taken as definitive.
*Any* source may be wrong, including ones with a high reputation for
accuracy. Nevertheless, we have no measure of reliability for any
source. Has anyone ever taken a statistically significant random sample
of SSDI records and tried to determine what percentage of those records
are erroneous? If that study determines that no record in a sample
(greater than 100) is in error I may be able to safely hypothesize that
the error rate is less than 1%. That is still not enough to say that
the SSDI is error free.
And it's not a primary source. "In
historiography, a primary source (also
called original source) is a document, recording, artifact, or other source
of information that was created at the time under study, usually by a source
with direct personal knowledge of the events being described." Social
security didn't even exist in 1904, so clearly this information was not
created in 1904.
The requirement that Social Security Numbers of newborn children appear
on a tax return is relatively recent. Before 1989 the person applied
himself.
Ec