Courtesy of Michael John Neill’s Genealogy Tip of the Day post “Finding and Not Finding Negative Evidence” dated 9-Aug-2025.
There’s confusion about negative evidence and negative findings. I see it in various postings and writings trying to differentiate the two. It can be easy to confuse them and frankly they are easy to confuse.
I searched for John Ufkes in the 1870 Hancock County and Adams County, Ilinois, federal census records. I used indexes and performed a manual search. That’s a negative finding. A negative finding is when I search for someone in a record and do not find them in that record. A negative finding can change if I eventually find the person in a record–perhaps by looking for my John Ufkes in a different county I find him. In that case my negative finding no long exists. I’ve got a negative finding if I don’t have the record to look at.
Negative evidence is different. With negative evidence, I have the record on the person, but there’s something not there that usually is.
The difference with negative evidence is that there is some detail, fact, or statement not in that record that is usually in records of that type. The absence of that detail, fact, or statement is potentially a clue and is our negative evidence. If a set of real property tax records contains a column for date the amount was paid and your ancestor’s column is blank for the date and the entries for other people do have a date listed, that’s negative evidence your ancestor didn’t pay his taxes. It does not say he did not pay them, but there’s no evidence he did and there is that information on other entries.
Negative evidence is when you’ve got a record on your ancestor and there’s something missing there that the others have. A negative finding is when you don’t even have the record on your ancestor to look at.
Submitted by Robin McCarthy
