It's On The Internet So It Must Be True
I've written on this topic before so
stop me if you've heard this one: beware of online family tree sites
and “make-it-fit” genealogy.
Let me take off my Italian cook hat and
put on my genealogical researcher shoes for a minute. And let me tell
you about those shoes. I started climbing my family tree back around
1970. It was a tough climb because the few elder relatives I had left
didn't want to talk about “that old stuff.” I had to dig and root
and ferret in courthouses and churches and cemeteries and libraries
and archives and historical society records for years just to get a
decent start. There was, thank goodness, no Internet or Ancestry.com
back in those days. I'll explain that sentiment in a second.
By the time the US Bicentennial came
along in 1976, I had enough experience in working the records that I
became a genealogical records searcher for several counties in the
state in which I lived. Clerks in these counties were being flooded
with requests from people trying to prove they were related to George
Washington or Benjamin Franklin or somebody famous they could brag
about. The perpetually overworked
and understaffed staff in these jurisdictions started farming out
these requests to qualified local researchers who would, for a fee,
handle all the legwork. Enter me. Thus I got a lot of experience
dealing not only with my own family tree but with a whole forest of
trees from all over the place.
Fast
forward about forty years and I finally published a comprehensive
book on my family. It was rich in detail, replete with copies of old
records and lots of sometimes faded photographs. It definitively
traced the path of my ancestors from their mid-nineteenth-century
European emigration up to and including my own generation. And it
sold tens of copies, not counting the ones I donated to the local
library and the historical society. Oh well, I didn't do it to become
rich and famous.
Part
of why I did do it was an attempt to counter the enormous
influence of all the new
cyber-sources that cropped up as the Internet grew and developed.
Ancestry.com was and is at the top of the food chain in this regard,
but there were and are lots of other sites like those sponsored by
the LDS church, for example. Don't get me wrong: these are tremendous
resources – if you know how to
do basic research before you start. That's why Ancestry's horrible
“you don't have to know what you're looking for; just start
looking” campaign a few years ago just ground my gears. Of course
you have to know what you're
looking for! Otherwise how will you know when you've found it? That's
like saying you don't have to be an electrician in order to wire your
house; just play with the wires until something lights up. There's
bound to be a YouTube video somewhere that shows you how to do it,
right? Uffa! (That's
Italian for sheeeeesh!)
Gentle
readers, please listen to me when I tell you you can't, can't,
CAN'T just plunder around on the
Internet for a few minutes and come up with a fully-developed and
completely accurate version of your family tree based solely on the
extremely questionable work of somebody else who probably did the
same damn thing. “Ooooh, I saw it on the Internet so it must be
true.” Aaaaaarrrrrggggghhhhh! (I
think that translates the same in Italian or English.)
Here's
an example: my sister and co-researcher called me this morning with
the latest “update” from Ancestry. It was a link to somebody who
was supposed to be related through our maternal grandmother. One
problem: we already knew this bird. He had all this great and
apparently thorough research going on. Names and dates and pictures
of people we knew we were related to, all right. But he had our
grandmother living nine years longer than she actually did and had
her buried a thousand miles from where she is actually buried. Had
her name right, had her married to the right guy and all, but when it
came to the end, he was all wrong. And the worst part of it was, you
couldn't tell him anything because he was convinced he was right. He
had found all the records on the Internet and they all matched up.
Never mind that my sister visited the woman in question for decades
and was present at her funeral. Or that I lived with her the last
fifteen years of her life and was one of six who carried her to her
grave in Osgood, Indiana in 1980. What did we know? His
grandmother, of apparently the
same or similar name, died in 1989 and was buried in Woonsocket,
Rhode Island and he was at her funeral
and because he had found everything he needed to know about her
online, he was right and we were wrong. And thus shall it ever be.
We've
got another nut hanging on our family tree who took up genealogy as
sort of a retirement hobby a few years ago and he is the undisputed
king of the Internet. I doubt that he has ever been in a library or
the records room of a courthouse, but he has all the answers and he
found them all right there at his fingertips in his living room or
wherever he does his “research.” In fact, he is so proficient
that he way outclassed
me. It took me nearly fifty years to trace my family back to the
mid-eighteenth century. He has been on the job for about five years
and he already has the family linked to seventh-century Saxon
royalty! Wow! Who'd a thunk that the farmer who left England in 1844
to become a farmer in America had royal blood in his veins? And
again, he saw it on the Internet so there's no use in questioning his
methods or his results. We're just waiting to see the link to Adam
and Eve.
And
then there's the well-intended cousin who is about half right about
half the time. Another offspring of the Internet, he has in recent
years at least made a pilgrimage or two to the old hometown to back
up his findings. The problem is that he interprets what he finds in
the wrong way and then posts it as gospel to the Internet for others
to do the same. No, Cuz, that wasn't my sister standing in that photo
with Grandpa. That was our uncle's step-daughter of the same name.
How do I know? Well, A) she was my sister and B) she had severe
cerebral palsy and never stood up a day in her brief life. A minor
detail, right? A detail that I'm sure wasn't on the Internet. So, no
that wasn't her, but thanks for telling the whole gullible online
world that it was. I'm sure I'll be seeing that misidentified photo
now on at least a dozen other “family tree” sites.
See,
that's the real issue. I wrote a freakin' two hundred-page book jam
packed with precise detailed information that took me nearly a
half-century to dig out of dusty old record repositories spread out
over several states. And a small handful of people read it. My
plugged in and connected cousins mainline their misinformation
directly to the World Wide Web and millions of “family researchers”
dutifully scribble it into their permanent records and claim it as
their own.
Please.
Don't. DO. This. Don't accept anything you read online at face value.
Not even the most experienced and competent researcher is infallible.
I'm working on a second edition of the book I published ten years ago
because I've found new information and, yes, discovered a couple of
errors in my own previous work. But the sheer volume of absolute
dreck masquerading online as reliable data is nothing short of
astounding. I have seen with my own eyes examples of children whose
birth dates were listed months after the death of their mother. I
have seen a man recorded on the Internet as dead and buried on a
certain date when I had in my hand his death certificate that showed
his passing eight years later. How about the woman who gave birth to
her son when she was six years old? Or my uncle whom a reliable
Internet resource had married to two different women two years apart?
They were both the same woman: one marriage was listed by her first
name and the other was by her middle name. And how they happened two
years apart I'll never know.
Don't
get me wrong. I have used the absolute hell out of online resources
since they first became available a couple of decades ago. It was an
online source that enabled me to find the name of the ship upon which
my paternal immigrant ancestors sailed from England. BUT.....I
already know from which port they sailed and what their departure and
arrival dates were. And that information I got from plain old grunt
work in old family records. I was able to find their street address
by accessing England's census online. BUT.....I already knew in what
town they were living at the time. The Internet enabled me to detail
the settlement of my Italian ancestors in Canada without actually
having to go to Canada. BUT.....because I talked extensively to my
grandmother when she was alive and available, I knew exactly where in
Canada to look. Internet sources and resources have enhanced and
improved the quality of my research, but they have never been nor
will they ever be the fundamental source of it.
I
don't tremble and quake every time Ancestry.com turns over a leaf. I
don't get all twitterpated every time I see what appears to be a
full-blown genealogy of any branch of my family online unless that
genealogy is in absolute lockstep with what I already know to be
true. I don't graft a limb, a branch, a twig, or even a leaf onto my
family tree until I can verify it through multiple empirical sources.
I don't take anybody else's word for anything I can't personally
authenticate through at least one other source. No matter how
tempting it might be, I don't engage in “close enough” or
“make-it-fit” genealogy that piggybacks on somebody else's often
questionable work. That's called “responsible research” and it's
unfortunately becoming less and less common in the burgeoning
“information age” in which we live.
I
suppose it's possible my grandmother arose from her grave in Indiana
and lived another nine years in Rhode Island. Maybe my totally
incapacitated sibling did stand up for a photograph and perhaps I am
descended from old Saxon royalty. After all, it's on the Internet so
it must be true.
But
I'm not counting on it.
