Click Your Way to Genealogical Success - Part Six

Finding Accurate Information

When I was in the very early stages of doing genealogical research, about thirty years ago, I got most of my information from the huge collection of family group records housed in the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah. This was long before FamilySearch came into existence and over the years, my extended family had submitted family group records to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and these records were stored on shelves in big binders in the Library. By the way, many of these records are now available in digital copies online. Here is a screenshot of the Collection page on FamilySearch.org.

https://www.familysearch.org/search/collection/2060211

Here is a screenshot of one of the records.

I ended up with a pile of photocopies about three feet high. These records were stored alphabetically and searching for records involved pulling the huge binders off of the shelves and paging through them looking for relatives. If I found one I was interested in, I had to pull the record out of the binder and take to a copy machine and make a copy. Copies cost 25 cents each. So I had rolls of quarters for copies. That stack of copies represented hundreds of dollars of copy costs.

If you look closely at this family group record (FGR) you will see that there is a small section that asks, "Where was information shown on this family record obtained?"

Could you identify the source of the information from this citation? I learned that this was one of two books and here are the current, more accurate, citations to these two books.

Tanner, George C. William Tanner of North Kingstown, Rhode Island, and His Descendants. Minneapolis, Minn.: Pub. by the author, 1905.

———. William Tanner, Sr. of South Kingstown, Rhode Island and His Descendants: In Four Parts. Faribault, Minn.: G.C. Tanner, 1910.

Essentially, the information on this FGR was copied from one of two books published in 1905 or 1910. If you did not know about the books, how would you know that this citation referred to the books? The reference to "B4 B14" is the Family History Library catalog number used at the time and no longer is in use.

More importantly, how would I or anyone else know whether or not the information on the FGR was accurate? How would even know if the person submitting the FGR had copied the information accurately from the book? The FGR did have the name of the person who submitted the record, but I found that most of these people were no longer alive or had moved and could not be located.

The challenge is that nearly all this information was incorporated into the Family Tree. Yes, nearly all this information without regard to the origin or accuracy of the information. In some cases, the incorporated information reinforces inaccurate or incomplete family traditions about ancestors and their identity. Some of the information can be verified but it may take extensive research to "correct" the inherited information. In addition, many of your relatives may have incorporated the inaccurate information in their personal files and may never have taken the time to verify what has been passed down from generation to generation.

The FamilySearch.org Family Tree is not the only online family tree program that has incorporated unverified and unsupported information. For example, I commonly find people in Ancestry.com family trees that have no supporting sources or just one or two. This is the case even though the program provides record hints for all its users. The same situation exists in many of the other online family tree programs.

If you have inherited ancestral information or have "borrowed" information from someone's family tree online, you should be extremely careful in accepting anything that is not supported by a source with a citation to the place where the information can be viewed and verified.

You can read the previous posts in this series here:

Part Five: http://genealogysstar.blogspot.com/2018/06/click-your-way-genealogical-success.html
Part Four: http://genealogysstar.blogspot.com/2018/04/click-your-way-genealogical-success_27.html

Part Three: http://genealogysstar.blogspot.com/2018/04/click-your-way-genealogical-success_25.html
Part Two: http://genealogysstar.blogspot.com/2018/04/click-your-way-genealogical-success_22.html
Part One: http://genealogysstar.blogspot.com/2018/04/click-your-way-genealogical-success.html