My readers, if you are not into genealogy, you are not going to know what I am running on about.
Since taking up the hobby of genealogy, I have found so much incorrect information in the literature and now on the internet. When I see it, I feel that it is the result of laziness. A person should never record something for posterity unless he/she can prove it. That does not preclude your making a conjecture on data that you have if you state that this is only your opinion and without proof. The written word or the tongue can carry information that is not true. Just because someone tells you a story or you find information in a book does not mean it is fact. I believe that most family history books propagate more myth than truth. When you look on the internet at some of the family trees, they are filled with atrocious errors that are apparent just by looking at them. Family trees tend to be copied by researchers and used as an easy way to fill out their own tree. They think nothing of having no proof. In fact, I find very few of the thousands of family trees in Ancestry.com that have proof.
You can probably tell that one of my pet peeves is finding data with no proof and in error being used in family histories and other genealogical work. I published a quarterly newsletter, The Brewer Researcher, for ten years. In it, I printed submitted articles and they were always sourced. I did not claim they were true, but at least one knew where they came from and could check them out. If they were authored by me, you can bet they were proven. I normally wrote an editorial each issue promoting the necessity of having proof of the data for your family histories. One of the worst errors is in my own lineage. It is published in hundreds of books, family histories, family trees and other media. It is that George Brewer (m. Sarah Lanier) was the son of John Brewer III. I offered a $100 reward several years ago for proof of this parentage. To this date, I have had no takers. I had been taken in by this misinformation myself until I published Marvin Broyhill’s The Brewer Families of Colonial Virginia, 1626-1776, in there he stated that not only there was no proof that George was the son of John III and, furthermore, there was no proof that John III even had children. This opened my eyes to the fact that I could be mislead just like everyone else.
The reason I have established this blog is to point out these errors as they occur in print or on the web and ask the persons who publish them to defend them on this blog. I don’t know if many will. We shall see.
This blog will not be daily, weekly or monthly. I will post on it when I think something needs to be said. I hope you will respond. That will make it much more fun and of more beneficial to all of us.
Since taking up the hobby of genealogy, I have found so much incorrect information in the literature and now on the internet. When I see it, I feel that it is the result of laziness. A person should never record something for posterity unless he/she can prove it. That does not preclude your making a conjecture on data that you have if you state that this is only your opinion and without proof. The written word or the tongue can carry information that is not true. Just because someone tells you a story or you find information in a book does not mean it is fact. I believe that most family history books propagate more myth than truth. When you look on the internet at some of the family trees, they are filled with atrocious errors that are apparent just by looking at them. Family trees tend to be copied by researchers and used as an easy way to fill out their own tree. They think nothing of having no proof. In fact, I find very few of the thousands of family trees in Ancestry.com that have proof.
You can probably tell that one of my pet peeves is finding data with no proof and in error being used in family histories and other genealogical work. I published a quarterly newsletter, The Brewer Researcher, for ten years. In it, I printed submitted articles and they were always sourced. I did not claim they were true, but at least one knew where they came from and could check them out. If they were authored by me, you can bet they were proven. I normally wrote an editorial each issue promoting the necessity of having proof of the data for your family histories. One of the worst errors is in my own lineage. It is published in hundreds of books, family histories, family trees and other media. It is that George Brewer (m. Sarah Lanier) was the son of John Brewer III. I offered a $100 reward several years ago for proof of this parentage. To this date, I have had no takers. I had been taken in by this misinformation myself until I published Marvin Broyhill’s The Brewer Families of Colonial Virginia, 1626-1776, in there he stated that not only there was no proof that George was the son of John III and, furthermore, there was no proof that John III even had children. This opened my eyes to the fact that I could be mislead just like everyone else.
The reason I have established this blog is to point out these errors as they occur in print or on the web and ask the persons who publish them to defend them on this blog. I don’t know if many will. We shall see.
This blog will not be daily, weekly or monthly. I will post on it when I think something needs to be said. I hope you will respond. That will make it much more fun and of more beneficial to all of us.
I agree with your premise, except for one thing. I believe that there are researchers who truly do not know how to determine what is true and what is not. They believe that if they find something on an internet tree that it must be true. I have learned a lot about research since I began my tree and unfortunately I believe that there are mistakes in it as well. Onward and upward.
ReplyDeleteThe words conjecture, surmise, and opinion, are all words that should be used if the word " documentation " is not available from your research findings. All it takes is putting an asterisk by one of those words just mentioned when you are reporting your findings, and it will help alleviate falsehood reporting. A blog such as this one is a teaching tool for all beginning researchers. I wish i could have had this info before me when i first started a website. I was kind of like what Dan said in not knowing how to determine what is true and what is not. I just read it or heard it, then put it down on paper as meant to be true. It took me several years to finally realize the mistakes that i had made. Now, i am trying to correct those mistakes. Jim is expressing a viewpoint that needs to be addressed.
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