How I Chased Down One Missing Fact
Thoughts on the pursuit of a stray detail.
Sometimes I can see a hole where a fact should be. There’s the entire fabric of known reality and this one thing, missing from the record. Or I get, like, a sense of movement, as if the fact is trying to wiggle out of reach. I have to try and catch it.
Caring about facts is, I believe, a moral and social obligation. Finding them is a skill, a craft, an art. An obsession. For me, anyway, an obsession.
For me it starts with a feeling of incredulity, tinged just a bit with offense. I have the thought, how can we not know this? There’s so much known—everything on the internet, the whole expanse of Wikipedia—and yet a simple, knowable detail is not there. It should be. It’s not.
Recently, for example, I was reporting on this lawsuit. Jerry “Trey” Falwell III is suing Liberty University for $1.75 million. He’s the son of Jerry Falwell Jr. and grandson of Jerry Falwell Sr., two significant names in the history of the religious right. They founded and grew this school and the school is important as well.
The missing fact was this: How old is Trey Falwell?
Maybe it didn’t matter. I had the rest of the story and the younger Falwell’s age doesn’t really change anything. None of the claims he’s making in the lawsuit hinge on age. None of the things other people are saying are specifically related to his age.
But … it should be known, right? The first Jerry Falwell’s birth and death dates are documented and easy to find. The second’s age is on Wikipedia, Internet Movie Database, and has been reported by various outlets. The third’s is missing.
Trey Falwell is more of a private figure than his father and grandfather. But he’s the scion. When he was born is part of the story. Also he was a vice president at Liberty, which has a staggering 140,000 students. He had a bit of a role in the scandals that connected Falwell Jr. to Donald Trump, a significant moment in recent history. And he is now launching a civil suit.
It bothers me. So I go looking for the fact.
He doesn’t have his own Wikipedia. Google’s artificial intelligence gives me an answer, 37, but cites a source that does not contain that information. Another search leads me to a website I don’t recognize with an article that says he’s 53 or 54. But that would mean he was born when his father was about 10? That doesn’t seem right.
In 2021, Politico reported Trey Falwell was “in his early 30s.” That’s too vague to make me happy.
It means the reporters at Politico couldn’t figure out the year Trey Falwell was born either. I would think they would know. Apparently not.
But it should be knowable.
I find two social media accounts connected to Falwell. Neither of them give his age. If anyone wished him happy birthday on Facebook, it’s not public.
Falwell’s mom Becki is active on the site and writes publicly about family stuff, including her son’s fight with Liberty. But nothing about when he was born.
Where else can I look?
I have several books about Falwells. Two don’t mention the third generation. One more recent one does, and has a lot about Trey Falwell, but doesn’t say how old he is.
On Amazon, I can do word searches inside half a dozen books about the Falwells that I don’t own, using the “read sample” function and then the embedded search tool. I check, and one of them talks about Trey being born, calling him “an adorable baby and a delightful child.” But no date of birth.
Should I give up? I think. Maybe it doesn’t matter. I think, I could say “early 30s,” but maybe it’s late 30s now. Or 40?
I wish I could reach out to him directly. But I already contacted Falwell’s lawyer and got nothing. And even if I said, “I only need to know how old you are,” it seems unlikely I’d get a response. I double check the lawsuit, just to see if for some reason it has a date of birth. Criminal court records regularly include this. Civil cases, not really.
Nothing.
But surely this information is somewhere. I know when I write the story, this won’t even merit a whole sentence. It’ll just be a number inserted after the second reference, “Falwell, (AGE), …” but why can’t I find it?!?
Then I search old newspapers on Newspapers.com. I have a subscription. I think it’s worth it. Sometimes, though, there’s too much and it’s hard to find what you’re looking for. Once I searched “Billy Sunday” and “baseball,” since the evangelist played baseball before becoming a preacher, and got every article about every man named Billy who ever played baseball on a Sunday. But I might get lucky.
I search “Trey Falwell” and, first hit, a story about him getting fired from Liberty in 2021. But it doesn’t say his age. There’s a story about him starting a frozen yogurt business in 2011. Doesn’t say his age. He made honor roll in a karate class in 1997. Doesn’t say his age. He hit a single in a high school baseball game in 2005.
That’s a little helpful. If he was between 14 and 19 in 2005, he was born between 1986 and 1991, which would make him mid to late 30s today. That matches what Politico reported. I’m as close as Politico got.
But not quite there.
I try another more thing: sort the newspaper articles chronologically. And one more: add the word “born” to the search.
There it is. Jerry Falwell III, known as Trey, was born July 26, 1989.
I get so excited by this I I trip over the simple math and come up with the age 38. Which is wrong, but I correct myself, double checking. He’s 36, turning 37 this summer.
I have it. I did it. I know.
Readers probably aren’t going to notice this detail. They’re certainly not going to think the story is a good story because it includes this fact. The inclusion won’t win the piece any professional awards.
So is it worth it to spend all the time tracking down one stray fact, like it’s the lost sheep from the 99?
Yeah. For me? Yes.
I loved searching for that fact. And I couldn’t not. And when I was done, that missing piece of the record, what we know about the world and reality and ourselves, was back where it should be, back in its place, the hole filled, knowledge restored.
Recent work
Trey Falwell is suing Liberty for $1.75 million, arguing that the university was entitled to fire him but not stop paying him.
A Texas Assemblies of God leader says victims’ lawsuit is “work of the devil.”
On the podcast where I explain the news to my pastor who doesn’t follow the news,
Freedom of the press
Journalism in American is mostly not dangerous. But occasionally, people respond to the publication of information they wanted secret with anger. And occasionally, with violence.
I’m glad this police officer in Huntsville, Alabama arrested a neo-Nazi before he could hurt a reporter.
The antagonism behind reformation
I think people have probably underestimated how much religious reformation in Christian history was motivated by anger at clergy. The feeling of being exploited, abused, and lied to is a powerful force. But left out of a lot of accounts of why and how things changed.
Three examples:
Between 900 and 1050, more than 600 monasteries across Western Europe received papal charters, saying they were not under the authority of their local bishop (who was nearby and could meddle) but the pope (who was far away and busy with many other things). According to historian Peter Heather, roughly one out of every four charters was actually forged and these regular appeals to the pope helped establish the authority of Rome.
In the Fourth Lateran Council—probably the most important church council of the middle ages—Catholic leaders said clerics needed to be celibate and church offices could not be bought and sold. Importantly, the church also established the rule that formal complaints against ministers had to be investigated.
The very first Reformed sermon preached in Mühlhausen, about 140 miles west of Martin Luther’s Wittenberg, started, with insults slung at priests, nuns, and monks. Historian Andrew Drummond reports the rogue preacher was summoned before the town council to face potential punishment, but he attracted so much popular (and rowdy) support, authorities decided to do nothing. Within six months, the council installed the man and two other Reformed preachers in the local pulpits and Mühlhausen was Protestant.
Restore my soul
Gregory of Nyssa, bishop in the late 300s in what is now central Turkey, taught that the salvific effect of Christ’s crucifixion did not loose the soul from the body. Rather, the work of the cross “again joined together what was divided as if by some sort of glue—I mean by divine power—fitting together what was torn apart.”
In the restoration of salvation, the soul returns to the body. And the body to the soul.
“This is the mystery of God’s economy regarding death and the resurrection of the dead,” Gregory wrote. “He … led them back to each other again by the resurrection, so that he himself might become the meeting point of both … in himself establishing the nature that had been divided by death.”
Something about that reminds me of prayer. There’s a way to think of it as separation of body and soul—the soul escaping. But maybe, following Gregory, the idea could be more like the idea of the resurrection, a restoration. In prayer, maybe you’re not loosening yourself from yourself, but returning, so the soul is in the body and the body in the soul, both turning together toward God.
I get this.
I'm a librarian. Your dogged fact-finding fills me with joy.