Professional Judgment Request 2015-2016: Fill & Download for Free

Unless your father qualifies as a dislocated worker, there is nowhere on the FAFSA itself to indicate that your family's financial circumstances have changed from the tax year (2015 for the 2016-17 academic year).However, you should contact your school (if you will be a freshman in 16-17 and are applying to more than one school, I would contact at least your 3 most likely schools) -- specifically, their financial aid office -- and explain your situation. Most schools have specific forms and processes for documenting special circumstances and requesting professional judgment. They will require documentation of the job loss. (Proof that your dad is receiving unemployment benefits are one way to demonstrate this.)Good luck!

Q. Do medical schools take into consideration your institution while looking at your undergraduate GPA? Will going to a grade-deflated school hurt my chances of getting into medical school?A. In general, medical school acceptance hinges on how high your MCAT score and undergraduate GPA are. High GPA is valued, regardless of your school or your major. Passing the first hurdle, other qualities make a difference of your gaining admission into a top tier medical school.If your GPA is in the lower range, allowance is made for the prestige of your undergraduate institution, the challenge of your major and whether there is known grade “deflation.” Even Princeton University reversed course. In 2014, the university made the decision to end grade deflation which had hindered the prospect of many graduates in past years.What can you do if you happen to be an engineering major in a school with serious grade deflation? Score extremely well on the MCAT!What is different about medical school admission compared to law school, business school and undergraduate admissions?Medical school ranking matters little in the medical field. US News Rankings do not make or break a school’s reputation. There is no consensus as to the actual order of the top schools. There is vague reputation as being the top 25, but no order. Schools do not have to worry about having the highest GPA, highest MCAT, lowest acceptance rate, highest yield so that the rank moves up a few notches. There is not even a recognized ranking of top schools. There is a ranking of schools with the highest NIH research funding, and a ranking of best schools in primary care. Both lists matter little in the opinion of those in medicine.Does the reputation of the medical schools matter in the career of graduates, like in law where graduates from Yale or Harvard dominate court clerkships and the Supreme Court bench? Medicine is a bit more complicated. The goal of every physician is to become board certified in a specialty of his/her own choosing. Schools are not strong across all disciplines. The Department of Surgery may be top tier, but the Department of Medicine may not be. The Department of Anesthesiology may be on probation, in part because of the supremacy of the Department of Surgery, causing difficulty in recruiting top quality Anesthesiology Staff. And even in the Department of Surgery, the Division of Plastic Surgery may be top tier, but the Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery may not be. The loss of several stars in a Division may change the fortune of that Division overnight.How do you pick the right school that has a top tier residency program in your chosen medical specialty when only 20–40% of students actually specialize in the specialty that made them want to become a physician in the first place?Does attending a less renowned medical school affect your career? The equalizing factors are successes on the USMLE exams and class rank (or membership in Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society, medicine’s equivalent of Law Review). With those credentials, a graduate of any medical school can enter any coveted specialty (currently Dermatology, Orthopedic Surgery, ENT etc.) Graduates of prestigious medical schools do dominate matching into the top tier residency programs in the top medical specialties upon review of recent match cycles. Pedigree does matter if you choose an academic career, where attending the best residency program, the best fellowship program and the connections lead to faculty appointments at prestigious institutions. Successes then may lead to leadership at institution, national and international levels in medical and specialty organizations.Back to the question of acceptance into any medical school, the process is “holistic”. The following are what medical college admission committees look for in candidates. First article is from the American Association of Medical Colleges. The second from the University of Minnesota. At the end is a short Kaplan discussion regarding GPA and MCAT in the application process.How Medical Schools Review Applications (AAMC)What are admissions officers looking for?While expectations, missions, policies, and requirements are unique to each medical school, many schools look for students who demonstrate an ability to handle challenging coursework and have the personal attributes needed to work with people. It’s important for applicants to show that they’ve done well in upper-level science courses, and “doing well on the MCAT® exam shows that you can handle medical school coursework,” says Irene Tise, admissions officer in the Office of Medical Student Admissions at Wake Forest School of Medicine.Lori Nicolaysen, assistant dean of admissions at Weill Cornell Medical College, adds that they “seek students who have also demonstrated exceptional personal initiative. Such initiative may take the form of leadership, creativity, research, community service, motivation, or other life experiences.”Mickey Foxwell, M.D., associate dean for admissions at University of Maryland School of Medicine says, “Each applicant needs to be as sure as possible that this is what they want to do with their life. That motivation can be demonstrated through academic achievement and also through exposure to clinical medicine and community service. Does the applicant know what it’s like to take care of someone? Does the applicant have an idea about the advantages and disadvantages of a career in medicine?”Schools also look for evidence that an applicant has demonstrated good judgment, compassion, and selflessness— qualities every physician should embody. Applicants can show evidence through their involvement in extracurricular activities, letters of evaluation, and their personal statement.What happens when my application is received?Each medical school has its own nuanced process for reviewing applications. For example, “Weill Cornell invites all applicants to complete the secondary application,” Ms. Nicolaysen shares. “Once the file is complete (including secondary application, letters of evaluation, and MCAT scores), the application is moved to screening. A number of experienced admissions committee members serve as screeners. Although Weill Cornell has fourth-year medical students on the admissions committee, the students do not screen applications.”Dr. Raquel D. Arias, associate dean of admissions at Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California, explains, “In order to give every candidate a fair review of their personal qualities and accomplishments, a single screener evaluates all candidates with a particular MCAT score at our school. This controls for the inevitable influence that this important test has on the process. An admissions officer reads every application submitted to the school.” (There is no automated filter.)At Wake Forest School of Medicine, Ms. Tise explains, “Because of the large number of applications we receive, we use a formula that separates and groups applicants based on their AMCAS® primary application. The groups are: 1) Proceed and send a secondary application, (2) Hold for MCAT score or other extenuating circumstances and notify candidates, and (3) Risk, based on academics.Those candidates in the “risk” category are reviewed individually by the associate dean and an executive committee of five faculty and admissions committee members. From there, a decision is made to either proceed with the application process or reject the application.” Typically, after secondary applications are submitted, the associate dean and a committee review the applications and place candidates into interview pools. Because of the large number of applicants, only a small percentage is asked to interview.How do reviewers decide whom to interview?Medical schools consider each applicant’s academic proficiency, whether they are likely to thrive in the culture of the institution, and if their experiences, attributes, and goals are in line with the school’s mission and goals. Inevitably, medical schools receive many more qualified applicants than they can interview and matriculate. The decision to interview one student over another can be very difficult to say the least.“It is incredibly challenging because there are so many admirable candidates,” Ms. Nicolaysen explains. “Ultimately, the committee screeners attempt to identify the best qualified applicants from diverse academic and personal backgrounds whom we deem most likely to build a dynamic learning environment at Weill Cornell and to become leaders in medicine.”Dr. Foxwell adds, “At University of Maryland, outstanding grades and MCAT scores do not guarantee that an applicant will be invited to interview. Just as important are extracurricular activities and life experiences, essays and personal comments in AMCAS, and letters of recommendation.”Dr. Arias says, “The path to becoming a physician is unique to each applicant; therefore, we do not mandate any particular course of study. We have no preference for a particular major (or minor). Evidence of the personal attributes of integrity, adaptability, language skills, collaboration, and a commitment to service are evaluated with an eye toward the development of physician scientists. We infer the desired applicant qualities from both the content of the application and the care with which it is delivered. Every aspect of the application is important. Applicants who speak in their own voice, without “spin,” is especially valued.”Additionally, some public medical schools also may consider an out-of-state applicant’s ties to the state or institution if non-state residents are not typically considered for matriculation. (For more information, check with individual medical school websites or consult the AAMC's Medical School Admission Requirements.)What are some common mistakes applicants make?The same tips you might have received for undergraduate or job applications hold true for medical school applications. Always tell the truth and be sure to mention activities and volunteer, research, or work experiences that are most important, and if possible, occurred within the last few years. “Take your AMCAS essay questions seriously,” counsels Ms. Tise. “These essays are not creative writing exercises. You may start off with a descriptive experience, but, move quickly into how and why you want to become a physician and how this experience helped determine that. Also, proofread carefully. There are no excuses for punctuation and grammatical errors. We know you are applying to several schools, but be careful to include the correct name in secondary materials.“Redundant information is a waste of space. Inconsistencies can call an applicant’s authenticity into question,” cautions Ms. Nicolaysen. “We advise not including high school activities or activities in which your participation was minimal. Also, try to avoid boasting or exaggerating.”Dr. Foxwell advises that “Applicants must begin to think like professionals. If a photograph is requested in a secondary application, make it a good one, not one that may call your professionalism into question.”What advice does the review committee have?“Do your homework. Know what schools are looking for, and work closely with your advisor,” cautions Dr. Foxwell.Your application needs to be complete and truthful. When it comes to your personal statement, Ms. Tise recommends, “There is no secret checklist or formula. Remember, you are the applicant, and we want to know why you think you are a good one.”Furthermore, Ms. Nicolaysen advises applicants, “Before submitting your application, ask some trusted mentors, friends, or family members to give you feedback about your experiences and essays. You might ask them questions like, ‘How would you describe me based on what you read? Did my essay hold your attention? Was anything confusing? Did you notice any typos?’”Most importantly, relax. Most applicants have one or two items that they wish they’d changed or perhaps a mistake they think they might have made. If you have further concerns or anxiety over the application process, check out the Aspiring Docs fact sheet on helpful tips for dealing with application anxiety.Essential and Desired Qualities of medical school candidates:Strong academicsHigh GPA and MCAT scores. See AAMC MCAT site for students.A commitment to improving the human conditionEssential:Sustained and meaningful commitment to human service demonstrated through volunteer activities, scholarly pursuits, employment, academic endeavors, or other experiencesUnderstanding of medicineSubstantial independent research experience(s) (MD/PhD applicants)Desired:Commitment to care of the underservedCommitment to community and global patient careProfessional conductHonesty and integrity, particularly regarding instances of personal failings or mistakes (essential)Compassion, evident through evaluations, prior employment, or experience in other roles that require compassion (essential)Self-awareness, evident in a student’s knowledge of their own strengths, weaknesses, and when to ask for help (essential)Ethical behavior (essential)Outstanding interpersonal skillsOral and written communication skills must be excellent, both to share knowledge and to convey empathy (essential)Teamwork skills require acknowledging other team members’ expertise, accurate self-assessment, assuming leadership when appropriate, and subsuming individual interests to the work of the team (essential)Cultural humility and inclusivity (essential)Leadership & diversity experiences (desired)A dedication to lifelong learningIntellectual curiosity (essential)Demonstrated scientific aptitude—a fundamental appreciation of how the scientific method is applied to the discovery of medical knowledge and to medical practice (essential)Potential for academic success (essential)Psychological resilience as demonstrated through emotional stability, skills to cope with stress, an ability to deal with sacrifice and hardship, maturity, good judgment, and an ability to defer gratification (essential)Creativity (desired)What’s the Average GPA for Medical School | Kaplan Test PrepNOVEMBER 30, 2016EMILY HAUSEAdmissions officials receive three different GPAs when reviewing applicants.A previous version of this article was originally published by Alex MacNow.While we’ve tackled the topic of medical school admissions by the numbers in the past, we turn our attention today to the average GPA for medical school. It’s stressful to think that a few bad grades in your undergraduate career can impact your chances of getting into medical school; however, it’s important to know that a low GPA can be overcome.Remember, the AAMC keeps GPA information public through their FACTS tables. In addition to what we’ve covered here, there is a lot more information you can glean from these resources. In the world of medical school admissions, knowledge is power!Breaking down the average GPA for medical schoolMedical schools are actually given three GPAs when they look at your application. Your science and math courses are considered according to what is called the BPCM (Biology, Physics, Chemistry, Math) GPA, and your non-science courses (humanities, social sciences, language, etc.) are considered as a separate GPA. The third GPA that schools see is the overall aggregate.While each medical school has its own average GPA for the incoming class (information for MD programs can be easily found in the Medical School Admission Requirements guidebook), the national averages for 2015–2016 were as follows:BPCM GPA: applicants 3.45, matriculants 3.64Non-science GPA: applicants 3.68, matriculants 3.77Overall GPA: applicants 3.55, matriculants 3.70What can I do if I have a below average GPA?Unlike the MCAT, for which many of you still have a clean slate, GPA is set during your college career. So what can you do if you’re applying and your GPA isn’t quite in the range above?1. Explain the GPA tactfullyYou have the opportunity to bring up any blips in your GPA on both the primary application (as part of the Personal Statement) and your secondary applications (in one of the essays or as an addendum to the application). Some secondary applicationseven provide a space for pieces of your application that you’d like to explain.When talking about a problem in your GPA, explain the reason behind the drop, but don’t make excuses! Medical schools want mature applicants who can take ownership of the problem, and—perhaps more importantly—can explain how it served as a learning experience. Did getting a not-so-great grade in Organic Chemistry I teach you how to study better, utilize office hours, or find new ways to learn so that you knocked Organic Chemistry II out of the park? These skills will help you become a better medical student. Explain that to the medical schools.2. Become an MCAT rockstarAccording to Kaplan’s latest medical school admissions officer survey, two of the most important factors in admission are the GPA and MCAT score. Thus, falling below the average GPA for medical school matriculants can be significantly abated with a stellar MCAT score. Prepare wisely and work towards your target MCAT score.3. Retake courses or consider post-bacc workThere are a number of post-baccalaureate programs in the country that can be optimal for a student who needs to boost their GPA (especially the BPCM GPA). Masters and post-bacc programs may also afford you opportunities to become involved in research or shadowing, thus helping your application portfolio that much more.

Genealogical documentation.This answer is going to be very long. I have a lot of ground to cover, and a particular sense in which I treat documentation like an elitist snob. I also feel a need to begin with the idea of the whole of genealogy as an exercise in elitism. This may seem like an understandable (if not a logical) position for someone like me, who takes pride in his accomplishments as a researcher, but it’s not my position.I. One might start by thinking genealogy is a pretty snobbish subject to begin with. Why go even farther into the weeds to find an aspect of it to be snobbish about? Once people start doing it, though—no matter how privileged their upbringing, nor how distinguished their own accomplishments—they generally find that many of their ancestors weren’t very privileged at all. Just ask Matthew Stewart, for instance, who came from “old money” that actually originated with his great-grandfather (The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy, The Atlantic, June 2018, part 9):I had long assumed that the Colonel was descended from a long line of colonels, each passing down his immense sense of entitlement to the next. … Robert W. Stewart was born in 1866 on a small farm in Iowa and raised on the early mornings and long hours of what Paul Henry Giddens, a historian of Standard Oil of Indiana [where Stewart was later an executive], politely describes as “very modest circumstances.” The neighbors, seeing that the rough-cut teenager had something special, pitched in to send him to tiny Coe College, in the meatpacking town of Cedar Rapids. It would be hard not to believe that the urgent need to win at everything was already driving the train when the scholarship boy arrived at Yale Law School a few years later.(However, the author’s views on modern-day inequality, expounded at length, are contested. See for example Jordan Weissman, Forget What the Atlantic Is Telling You. The 1 Percent Are Still the Problem, Slate, 18 May 2018.)Many of the sources that we find genealogically useful today are simply products of individuals’ efforts to make their way in life. They formed families, joined formal or informal organizations, traded in land and goods, and occasionally settled disputes in court or “out of doors.” In a modern society, all of these acts and more could produce records, whether the participants were “great,” humble, or somewhere in between. At its best, a genealogy is a collective biography of people of all classes, informed not only by records of the events that directly involved them, but also by a sensitive understanding of the social conditions under which the events unfolded. Elizabeth Shown Mills, “Genealogy in the Information Age: History’s New Frontier?” National Genealogical Society Quarterly 91 (2003): 260–77, at 277, conceives it as an answer to the fictional Martin J. Dooley of Chicago ([Finley Peter Dunne,] Observations of Mr. Dooley [1906/1902], 271, via Google Books).I know histhry isn’t thrue, Hinnessy, because it ain’t like what I see ivry day in Halsted Sthreet. If any wan comes along with a histhry iv Greece or Rome that’ll show me th’ people fightin’, gettin’ dhrunk, makin’ love, gettin’ married, owin’ th’ grocery man an’ bein’ without hard-coal, I’ll believe they was a Greece or Rome, but not befure.Not only is genealogy not a preoccupation with the aristocratic, as is sometimes alleged; a preoccupation with the aristocratic actually forecloses the full range of possibilities for genealogical study, and ultimately defeats its purposes, even when its subjects are the “greats” of the present day.II. No, my idea of elitist snobbery is not inherent in genealogy itself. It extends only to the nature and uses of the documentation that is proposed as evidence for family relationships. It’s not as if I haven’t been warned against it—or at least some version of it. This is precisely the purpose of Thomas W. Jones, Skillbuilding: Perils of Source Snobbery, OnBoard 18.2 (May 2012): 9, 10, 15, via Board for Certification of Genealogists.Jones begins with a distinction between sources that are preferred and those that are disdained. He proposes to base this distinction on “analytical tests”—evaluations of documents that focus on whether or not their contents are likely to be factually correct in every detail. However, Jones does not dwell on the content of these tests. He seems to suppose that genealogists apply the criteria, not to individual records, but to whole categories of documents. The most basic criterion of evaluation is whether or not the records appear, on their face, to reflect eyewitness testimony of events as they happened. Thus Jones’s examples of typical preferred sources include “most original court, immigration, land, military, probate, religious, tax, and vital records.” On the other hand, disdained sources “typically are derivative sources, often poorly documented, containing information from hearsay or an unknown person, like many online family trees.”It is somewhat surprising that Jones, writing for the membership of one of genealogy’s foremost professional groups, does not address the character of the information as primary, secondary or undetermined, nor the character of the evidence as direct, indirect, or negative. Even his depiction of sources as original or derivative is incidental. Yet all three dimensions—source, information, and evidence—are fundamental to Mills’s Evidence Analysis Process Map (Elizabeth Shown Mills, Evidence Explained: Citing History Sources from Artifacts to Cyberspace, 3rd ed. [Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Company, 2015], front endpaper, emphases hers):Basic Principle: SOURCES provide INFORMATION from which we identify EVIDENCE for ANALYSIS.However, the mystery is dispelled when we remember that neither information nor evidence is judged according to the character of the source. “As a rule,” Mills explains, “primary information carries more weight than secondary, although either class of informants can err. Moreover, any statement can represent both firsthand and secondhand knowledge. … Therefore, each piece of information within a source must be appraised separately” (Evidence Explained, 25). Jones appears to be suggesting that source snobbery consists of assigning or withholding preference to sources, irrespective of their contents (“information”) and interpretation (“evidence”). If someone does that with a source, then not only are the information and evidence not important to the evaluation; it is even hard to maintain that the evaluation is based on an “analytical test” or any other objective qualification.Under the evidence analysis process that genealogists had inherited from academic history, it was possible to speak of a source as a unity, and as primary or secondary in its entirety. This conception lasted long enough to leave its mark on Donn Devine, “Evidence Analysis,” Professional Genealogy: A Manual for Researchers, Writers, Editors, Lecturers, and Librarians [1st ed.], ed. Elizabeth Shown Mills (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Company, 2001), 327–42, esp. 333. At this point, Devine seemed to conceive of an original source as a document created near the time of the events recorded, by bearers of primary information. It was not universally recognized at the time that original records can and often do bear secondary information; that there is no time limit on the bearing of eyewitness testimony, short of the witness’s demise; and that different pieces of information within the same source might not bear the same weight. (I would guess that since 2001 Devine, who like Jones and Mills is a longtime associate of the Board for Certification of Genealogists, has adjusted to the Board’s position on the nature of an original record. This is succinctly expressed in Genealogy Standards, 50th Anniversary ed. [Nashville, Tenn.: Ancestry.com, 2014], 77–8 and passim.)One way to understand Jones’s distinction between preferred and disdained sources is as a revival of the old dichotomy between primary and secondary sources, under different names. On this conception, genealogists have a tendency to prefer some sources because they are treatable as primary, and to disdain others that are treatable as secondary. The instinct behind this practice is much the same one that gave rise to the old dichotomy in the first place. Unfortunately, the practice relies on obsolete standards of evidence analysis. Jones’s point is that sources of preferred kinds (“primary sources”) may contain errors, and sources of disdained kinds (“secondary sources”) may actually be accurate. Thus it is hazardous to assume that a source is accurate or inaccurate merely from a presumption for or against every source of the same type.III. Everything in Jones’s essay is true as far as it goes. It is often helpful for an eager researcher to remember that the involvement of people concerned in a record is not a guarantee of its accuracy. But what Jones doesn’t tell us about when we can trust a typically disdained source is practically everything.Jones proposes that a disdained source is exactly like a preferred one, in terms of whether it is validated by the sum of the evidence bearing on a given research question. Any information from any source must be correlated with information from other sources before any judgment can be made on its accuracy. Jones concludes, “effective family historians consult and assess all sources, regardless of type, that might help answer their research questions. They exclude no potentially useful source, and they trust no unverified source.”Jones’s Table 1 shows ten instances from nine separate articles in the National Genealogical Society Quarterly from 1995 through 2010, in which a preferred source was found to contain an error. By comparison, Jones strains to name instances in which disdained sources were used, in his own words, to “show the only or most efficient path to reliable, informative records, or … provide evidence critical to the researcher’s conclusion.” His footnote flag at the end of this sentence cites two additional articles from the same journal. In addition, among the references describing preferred sources with erroneous information, there is a third essay whose title indicates that disdained sources were also considered there, under different terminology.George L. Findlen, “Using Questionable Sources Productively: The Parents of Rial, Edwin, and George Plummer of Alna, Maine,” National Genealogical Society Quarterly 96 (2008): 165–76. However, as we shall soon see, its interest arises from much more than the author’s use of “anonymous undocumented queries written more than a century after Plummer brothers were born,” which is all that Jones’s footnote mentions.Thomas W. Jones, “The Three Identities of Charles D. McLain of Muskegon, Michigan,” National Genealogical Society Quarterly 96 (2008): 101–20 at 107.Thomas W. Jones, “The Children of Calvin Snell: Primary versus Secondary Evidence,” National Genealogical Society Quarterly 83 (1995): 17–31.These cases have particular bearing on what it means to decide a genealogical case based on a source that might be considered questionable on its face. They require closer examination.IV. We begin with Findlen. That the three Plummer men were brothers, and two of them were natives of Alna, was documented by conventional methods. Users of an electronic database accessed by Findlen had reported parents for Edwin and Rial, but this claim could not be documented in multiple collections of local records from Alna and adjacent towns.The breakthrough came when Findlen inspected two letters from one Alna-area historian and genealogist—Henry Otis Thayer—to another—William Davis Patterson. Thayer wrote on behalf of “A correspondent” (that is, someone who had previously written to him), giving something resembling the same names for George’s parents that later were given for Edwin and Rial’s, and requesting confirmation of the names of George’s father and grandfather.Because none of the other correspondence survives—not from Patterson, nor from Thayer’s source—it could not be determined exactly what Thayer had learned from the others. Nevertheless, Patterson was closely related to the Plummer family—a grandnephew of the Plummer brothers’ mother—and, in his personal files, recorded all three brothers as sons of the same proposed parents.Perhaps Patterson incorporated information relayed to him by Thayer and his informant, but he also could have relied on any number of local eyewitnesses as well, who were contemporaries of his Plummer cousins as well as himself. Curiously, Findlen does not mention these last possibilities. He rates all of the information in all of the sources as secondary, on the grounds that neither writer had specified any eyewitness or documentary basis for naming the parents of Rial, Edwin, and George. Findlen’s rationale for the identification lies in the statements’ mutual corroboration and apparently independent origins.In truth, there actually is very little reason to believe that the findings of Thayer and Patterson were wholly independent of one another. There also is no reason to believe that each didn’t draw on additional sources—Patterson in particular being, Findlen concedes, “as well-positioned and qualified as anyone in the early twentieth century to identify the Plummer brothers’ parents” (p. 173). His record is surely the one that is most likely to have drawn on the widest range of relevant surviving testimony at the time, and the one that best sustains a “preference.” Thayer may give some of the same information, but even Jones, in “Perils of Source Snobbery,” admits that merely duplicating information from one manuscript to another does not constitute corroboration. (“For example, a family Bible’s birth date chiseled onto a gravestone remains uncorroborated.”) Thayer’s facts might well have been copied twice—from Patterson’s notes to his letter and then from Patterson’s letter to Thayer’s. For all the attention Findlen gave to his sources’ claims to authority, he seems to have quailed at the thought that any of the claims might have been superior to the others.One has to ask, finally, what Findlen would do without Patterson. He would be reliant, by default, on Thayer. His second letter suggests that Patterson might have already reported the correct answer, but Thayer was not quite ready to accept it. By Jones’s standard of evidence analysis, this would leave Findlen in quite a fix. He would have to consider whether the case could be decided on one manuscript after all. Or, he could simply confess that this is very close to the state of the case with Patterson and Thayer together—because, on balance, Thayer gives little reason not to assign Patterson the priority.Neither do the twentieth-century queries—which, contrary to Jones’s characterization, were not anonymous at all. They were signed by their contributor, George E. Plummer of Berkeley, California, whom Findlen identifies as George’s great-grandson. The range of topics that George E. engaged over the time span in which the queries were printed shows that he acquired relevant knowledge as the series progressed. However, no other correspondence to or from him is available, and we once again have no means of determining his informants’ names—or what facts he might have obtained, directly or indirectly, from Thayer and Patterson.As with Thayer, it is impossible to rule out contributions by Patterson in George E. Plummer’s writing; and because of this, we once again have no choice but to evaluate Patterson’s information on its own terms. That Patterson acquits himself remarkably well is not an index of what Thayer, Plummer, and Findlen might have learned independently of Patterson, because Findlen ultimately has not demonstrated that there is any such outside source on which to draw.V. Jones cites his McLain article, like Findlen, for a very limited purpose: as “an example of undocumented family trees on Ancestry.com as key to solving a complex genealogical problem.” In fact, this abbreviated reference serves his purpose in “Perils of Source Snobbery” better than his reference to Findlen.Jones had not succeeded in establishing the parents of Charles D. McLain by conventional research methods. He had found a possible, post-divorce second marriage for him, but no direct proof that it pertained to the same man—although he found the circumstantial evidence in favor compelling enough to pursue. So he searched for entries of this wife among the online family trees. According to an entry contributed by DeWayne G. Baker, one David R. McLain had entered the same marriage. Baker also identified his parents. Conventional methods of research on this family, now focused on David and his parents as well as Charles, produced further circumstantial evidence in favor of identifying David with the same man who had entered both of the marriages.Jones makes it quite easy to see how the Ancestry search marked a turning point in his research. However, had the narrative centered on Charles’s life rather than on the process employed by Jones, it could just as easily have been written without using Ancestry. Throughout the rest of the article, Jones does not refer to it again.The essential point is that Jones somehow obtained a statement that David had been credited with the same 1886 marriage that Jones himself was prepared to attribute to Charles. The medium on which he obtained it is novel, but the technique is not. An undocumented statement literally handwritten on paper might have roused him to the same mission, which he would have tried to fulfill with the same procedure.Without Jones’s subsequent research, of course, this purpose could never have been realized. But now that we have means of sustaining the identification that are better than referring to Baker, with his lack of documentation, we need never refer to Baker again—as an authority on this claim or any other. In other words, having used something “as a hint” entails no future obligation to regard it as a reliable source on other genealogical statements. This is part of the bargain: what it means to say, once again with Mills, that “each piece of information within a source must be appraised separately” (Evidence Explained, 25).If one undocumented statement in a source of overall doubtful accuracy has been useful for research, it still leaves a genealogist free to disregard all the other statements in the same source. How’s that for snobbery?VI. The title of the Snell article suggests it was written under the lingering influence of the old dichotomy between “primary sources” and “secondary sources.” Before Elizabeth Shown Mills had even printed Evidence! Citation & Analysis for the Family Historian (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Company, 1997), let alone devised the conceptual distinction among sources, information, and evidence at the center of her Evidence Analysis Process, this borrowing from the tradition of academic history was understandable. Still, a question beckons. Did Jones’s view of “secondary evidence” in 1995 correspond with his view of “disdained sources” in 2012?His summary of the preferred source in “Perils of Source Snobbery” describes it thus: “Will omitting testator’s eleven children and falsely identifying three heirs.” As to the latter, Calvin Snell’s will suggests that there were two sons and one daughter who are not thus named elsewhere. So much for “primary evidence.”What “secondary evidence” does he raise up in opposition to it? It consists of four separate post facto writings that each name incomplete sets of the children of Calvin Snell. One is a compiled four-volume Snell manuscript, dated 1934; one is a 1979 memorandum by Calvin’s great-granddaughter, copied from notes dictated to her by her mother, Calvin’s granddaughter; one is a genealogy of a son-in-law’s family, printed in 1896; and one is a loosely organized manuscript of uncertain date and authorship. He introduces them in the text as “unofficial sources” (p. 20), but summarizes them in a two-page table whose heading calls them “Secondary Sources” (p. 22). Now, of course, they are more properly described as “sources bearing secondary or undetermined information,” exactly the type that drove all the other studies I have described. This one meshes seamlessly with the others.Jones’s sources do not agree on every name, but there is considerable consistency across the lists. As with Findlen, Jones takes this consistency as evidence that they were composed separately from independent precursors. Jones has more justification for his use of the procedure; it is much easier to rule out the participation of one informant in the creation of multiple records in the Snell case than the Plummer case, and the Snell sources all contradict Calvin’s will in similar ways.Even so, it is still possible to rank them by preference, choosing any criteria that we like. Suppose that I rank them according to the likelihood that each source had immediate contact with Calvin or his children. Personally, on these grounds I would first take the 1896 source, then the 1934, then the 1979, then the undated. If any grandchildren of Calvin can be proven to have lived through 1934 or had contact or correspondence with the author of the Snell genealogy, that alone could put its reliability at a par with the 1896.Anyone may disagree with my ranking. The point is that when we get down to making empirical judgments—especially in cases where our information is contradictory—we need defensible reasons for selecting one apprehension of the facts over another. We may even refrain from making a judgment if none of the available apprehensions of the facts seem to be satisfactory. In the process, we sometimes rate one source more highly than another, even if they disagree minimally over the facts. In a conflict, we are not debarred from declining to accept a source because of factual claims that resist validation, and we are not entitled to believe things solely for self-ratifying reasons.VII. Whether you have had the forbearance to read all of the above or not, I feel that a summary is in order. Genealogy is already mistaken by many for a preoccupation with the elite. But researchers don’t accomplish anything worthwhile if they bring that attitude to the topic, and in any case I doubt that many people with a sophisticated grasp of the subject consider it a channel for elitism and snobbery.What I have, instead, is a qualified dissent on Thomas W. Jones in “Perils of Source Snobbery,” particularly if it entails a presumption that one source is never to be preferred over another. I have no brief against his claim that a piece of information cannot be excluded on the mere grounds that it arises from a derivative or authored source of doubtful accuracy, nor that standard original records do not always provide adequate proof of basic facts. In principle, there is nothing objectionable about these claims.However, the proposition that pursuing identifying statements in non-standard sources can overcome the limitations or complete lack of relevant original records requires a more powerful defense than Jones offers in the essay, simply because it seems so unbelievable on its face. Jones does cite a few cases to offer support for this claim, without defending it at length. Unfortunately, Jones overstates George Findlen’s reliance on a twentieth-century researcher’s queries, and in addition Findlen himself seems to overstate his source writers’ absence of coordinated effort.Jones’s own McLain and Snell cases are more informative on the procedure of developing an acceptable statement of probable facts from a combination of derivative records and corroborating statements from original records. However, even his cases do not foreclose the possibility of ranking different derivative sources according to singular criteria, and judging the strength of a statement’s probability according to how much confidence it seems to warrant compared with other sources touching on the same question.I certainly don’t expect a research project beginning with a collection of documents, each apparently unacceptable on its face, to end by affirming their probable accuracy on the sole grounds that they happen to agree on more points than they disagree. I am reminded of the literary critic Frederick Crews in another context, speaking of “the classic sophistry of … ascribing a cumulative weight to reports that, when regarded one by one, are lighter than air” (“The Mind Snatchers” [1998], Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays [Emeryville, Calif.: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2006], 204). In every successful instance under review, there are always independent documentary grounds for believing that the genealogical claims are accurate. Deciding the truth of genealogical claims on these grounds whenever possible, and withholding judgment on “disdained” sources as long such evidence remains unavailable, I take as essential precepts of responsible source snobbery.If, as appears likely in the Plummer case, the main sources of information all appear to have developed from one spring, there is no need—and considerable risk—to posit the “independent” later creations of records whose freedom from influence of the main spring cannot be verified. We may have no option but to accept that there is only one truly original record for a given statement of fact. In that case, the search for corroborating evidence aims only to show that this record pertains to, and gives reliable information on, the person whose biography and family relationships are the objects of the study.Some of the ideas above, especially as they relate to Professional Genealogy (2001), I had also shared in July 2016 with other members of ProGen 29. They bear no responsibility for my adaptation here.