When I was little, I can remember
believing that anything you saw in print was true and accurate.
I don't know where I got the idea - probably nowhere, just a trusting
little kid's reaction to the bright new world around him.
As I grew older, my beliefs changed. I became sure that newspapers
and other "instant news" sources were usually more wrong
than right. Still, I held on to a general belief that books and
magazines - you know, publications in which the contents had been
really researched - were likely more accurate than otherwise.
Now that I am old... well, it's tough to put complete faith in
any form of written or oral communication.
That brings me to the Internet. If you own a television, you've
probably seen the ad (I don't remember the product it was advertising)
where the woman tells the man that she "saw it on the internet,"
and that "they can't say anything on the internet that isn't
true." The man asks her where she heard that, and she answers,
"On the internet." She then walks off with her new boyfriend,
who she met on the internet and who is (clearly not!) a French
model.
That seems laughable - I'm sure it's the irony that the ad producers
were aiming for - and yet it seems that many people currently
"doing genealogy" are treating internet information
like the naive woman with her "French model" boyfriend.
Perhaps the greatest repudiation of the statement "they can't
say anything on the internet that isn't true" is the ubiquitous
"family tree."
Today on the internet, you can find Ancestry trees, Wiki trees,
and another dozen or so associated with some of the many, many
genealogy websites that have sprung up on the World Wide Web.
This isn't strictly an internet phenomenon; it grew out of the
Mormon practice of gathering information on deceased relatives,
so that they can be baptized posthumously. Over the years, church
members gathered so much family information that the Mormons began
making it available not just for their rites, but to anyone who
was interested in genealogy. Before the days of everyone having
their own computers, the information was available on microfilm,
and sometimes in a printed format. With the increasing availability
and popularity of computers, each Mormon family history library
was equipped with computers for both data retrieval and data entry.
Any of us who have been "doing genealogy" for more than
about 20 years have used the Mormon ancestral files, and we often
found good information in them. But they had a serious problem
from the start: the additions to the system were not monitored
or edited in any way. Consequently, a database developed that
had absolutely no reliability. You might enter the most complete,
best documented genealogy ever prepared; I might enter the worst.
The database treated them just the same. While it was sometimes
possible to check the original submittal, it was a difficult process,
and I suspect it was seen by few people who were not advanced
genealogists. The upshot was that, while some of the resulting
family trees were good, you couldn't know how good - or how bad
- without considerable research to try to verify the information.
That's how research is done, of course; unfortunately, most genealogy
is not "done" by trained researchers, so most of the
Mormon family trees were used just as they were entered into the
system.
Poor family trees were always a problem, but they became a much
bigger one as genealogy developed into one of the most popular
computer pastimes. Instead of one suspect ancestral file on the
Mormon computers, there were suddenly thousands of suspect ones
on a variety of websites. Some are probably "good,"
but there is no way to know which are the good ones. Like the
Mormon ancestral file, most trees are not evaluated or edited.
Most do not cite the sources of their information; probably well
over 90 percent of the "sources" cited with family trees
are Federal censuses, Find-a-grave records, and other family trees.
Censuses put people at a certain place at a certain time; there
are more errors in them than you might think (ages, birthplaces,
spelling of names, middle initials), but are generally reliable.
Find-a-grave reports are good for death dates, and sometimes for
birthdates, and some of the reports include photos of gravestones,
family portraits, and even transcripts of obituaries. Another
on-line family tree that does not include references is worthless
for supporting or verifying your own data. You may preface your
citation with a phrase such as Ancestry.com uses: "This
source provides evidence...," but it doesn't.
By all means, use on-line family trees to find clues - I still
do, although the number of errors I've found in just the 50 or
so families I've researched the most is pretty discouraging. Just
remember that the information included is probably just as likely
to be wrong as it is to be right. If you're serious about your
genealogy, then find real sources.
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