When I studied history at school I was introduced to the concept of sources. There were three types:
Primary Source
“An artifact, document, diary, manuscript, autobiography, recording, or any other source of information that was created at the time under study. It serves as an original source of information about the topic.”
Primary source, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Primary_source, accessed 2nd January 2023.
Secondary Source
“A document or recording that relates or discusses information originally presented elsewhere.”
Secondary source, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Secondary_source, accessed 2nd January 2023.
Tertiary Source
“An index or textual consolidation of primary and secondary sources.”
Tertiary source, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Tertiary_source, accessed 2nd January 2023.
I forget the exact wording used by my teachers, but the versions from Wikipedia, above, are close enough to how I remember them. But when I think about sources in genealogy, the definitions I learned in school history lessons are of limited use. As family historians our preoccupation is with the reliability of the information we find in sources and how it relates to our research question.
Just one source – a birth, marriage or death certificate, say, or a page from a census return – can hold multiple items of information about multiple individuals, contributed by multiple informants.
Each informant was in possession of varying degrees of knowledge, memory or written reference, reported with varying degrees
