Talk:Inez Catalon

Birth date discrepancies
In doing research for this article, I found several conflicts when trying to determine Catalon's birth date, including among multiple reliable sources. A generic, public search of her name on Ancestry.com revealed similar conflicts in multiple family tree data to what is described below. I don't have access to official birth, marriage, or death certificates/records. I searched the handwritten 1930 census roll data for Kaplan, Louisiana found at the Internet Archive website but couldn't find a match for the specific Catalon family described in this article, and no mention of an Inez Catalon. I could not find any information on her at the Find-a-Grave website. Catalon's entry in the Library of Congress Name Authority file does not include any birth date information.

Because of the discrepancies described below, I entered Catalon's birth year in the article using "circa" and used the birth year of 1913 as there were more independent citations that used that information. If other editors have access to more official records or additional reliable sources than cited below, please update the article.

The details, in chronological order of the year of birth years I found:

1911:


 * Catalon's obituaries (November 1994) in both the New Orleans Times-Picayune and the Baton Rouge Advocate did not include a specific birth date but said she was 83 years old at the time of her death on November 23, 1994, which would have made her birth year 1911. However, that birth year was found nowhere else in my research and prior articles about Catalon in both of those newspapers stated her age differently (see below).


 * Catalon's obituary (1994) in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution also stated her age at death as 83, but the content of this article appears to have been sourced from the Baton Rouge obituary.

1913:

If the sources below are correct, then Catalon would have been 81 years old at the time of her death.


 * Catalon's obituary in New Orleans' OffBeat magazine (January 1995) gives a birth date of September 23, 1913. This same article, however, also described her as "the 50-year old singer" which is likely a typographical error.


 * An article in the Baton Rouge Advocate (December 1997) says she was born in 1913 (no month or day stated)


 * Another article in the Baton Rouge Advocate (September 5, 1993) described her as "soon-to-be-80" years old, which would make her birth year 1913 (no month or day stated).


 * Liner notes for the album Louisiana Creole Music (1978) claims a birth year of 1913 (no month or day stated)

1918:

If the sources below are correct, then Catalon would have been 76 years old at the time of her death. The first two citations below contain very similar text, so it is assumed they are based on the same underlying source.


 * A biographical dictionary (2001) states her birth date as September 25, 1918.


 * The NEA's National Heritage Fellowship website also states her birth date as September 25, 1918.


 * An article in the Times-Picayune (May 28, 1993) described Catalon as "A 75-year-old" (no month or day stated), which is consistent with a 1918 birth year.

Vague birth year references:


 * In a 1991 interview, published in 1993, Catalon was described as being "now in her mid-70s"


 * Finally, a 1994 article about Marce Lacouture and Inez Catalon included a photo of Catalon taken in 1993. I recognize that this is entirely subjective and non-scientific, but in this photograph Catalon looks more like she was 80 than 75 years old at that time. NOLA1982 (talk) 18:44, 18 January 2020 (UTC)