Saturday Night Genealogy Fun -- Your Oldest Confirmed Record

 Calling all Genea-Musings Fans: 

 It's Saturday Night again - 

time for some more Genealogy Fun!!

Here is your assignment if you choose to play along (cue the Mission Impossible music, please!):

1)  What is "Your Oldest Confirmed Record?"  What is one of the oldest documents you've personally found for any ancestor? 

2)  Share your oldest confirmed  record:  what it is, where it came from, and what it revealed. 

3)  Share your oldest confirmed record in your own blog post, or in a comment on this blog post, or write a Substack post, Facebook Note, or in some other social media system.  Please leave a comment with a link on this post so others can find it.

I was unsure what "oldest confirmed record" means.  Is it "a record only I have?"  Is it "the first record I ever found?" Is it "a record that is old in years that I've found in a repository or online database?"  Is it "an old church confirmation record?"

 I asked Google Search AI and it told me:

An "oldest confirmed record" is the furthest back verified document, like a birth certificate or census entry, that proves a specific ancestor's existence in a family tree.

So let's go with that.

Thank you to Linda Stufflebean for this topic.

Here's mine:

I have dozens (hundreds?) of church records, land records, and probate records, from the 1600s and perhaps even the 1500s.  I did not take the time to find the "oldest" record in my family tree with 75,000 profiles. So I will go with an "old" one I recently found and still remember finding it:  

My Treasure Chest Thursday post this week turned up a 1609 baptism in the Cockfield, Suffolk, England parish records for my 9th great-grandfather Thomas Gleson (1609-1686), son of Thomas Gleson. 

Other researchers have identified the parents of Thomas Gleson as Thomas Gleson and Ann Amesby from their 1602 marriage record in Cockfield, Suffolk, England.  Here is the record (snipped from a larger image). 

A source citation?

Cockfield, Suffolk, England Parish Register, Thomas Gleson and Ann Armsby marriage record, 28 October 1602; imaged, Ancestry.com   

(https://www.ancestry.com/imageviewer/collections/62751/images/62751_372055000018_1450-00033 : accessed 25 September 2026), "Suffolk, England, Church of England Baptisms, Marriages and Burials, 1538-1812," > Cockfield, 1561-1760 > image 32 of 248. 

424 years ago, my 10th great-grandparents married.

This is an Original Source wth Primary Information and Direct Evidence of the marriage of my 10th great-grandparents. It came from an English parish church record which was digitized by Ancestry.com and put into a searchable database (although I found it be searching the Cockfield register manually). 

This record is evidence of the marriage of my 10th great-grandparents, and my baptism record of their son is evidence of his approximate birth date. I also have the marriage record for the son Thomas Gleson marrying Susanna Page in 1634 in Cockfield, and the birth of their son Joseph Gleason in 1640 in Cockfield.  But I need the evidentiary records of the next 11 generations down to me to prove my descent from Thomas and Ann (Armesby) Gleson.  

I have a lot of evidence because I've been working on it for almost 40 years, but I haven't documented every birth/baptism, marriage, and death/burial through all those generations.  Some records don't exist.  

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