  |
|
|
|
How Reliable is Genealogy on the Internet?
This archived discussion is "read only".
» aggie80 - Vote and I'd like to hear from you! I'm preparing to do an article on Internet Genealogy Services and would like to hear your experiences.Please take a minute to vote in the poll as to your opinion on the reliability. Let me know if there are other choices I should include! -- posted by aggie80 » plox - Re: Vote and I'd like to hear from you! In response to message posted by aggie80:I have only used the information which is free on the internet. It has been useful for providing clues and guideposts for research. Very useful in finding distant cousins searching for the same family who may have a different piece of the puzzle. Very useful in narrowing down the county I need to concentrate on. There are mistakes in information of course. The old hand-written census records are very difficult to read even when the enumerator spelled names right. For instance, my grtgrdfather's name Abner was transcribed as Alenor in the 1880 Census which recently went on-line. Then there are the family trees posted by other amateurs like myself. It bemused me recently to find my grtgrdparents listed as members of some other family with the same names but not the same dates or places. Correspondence with the poster was useful to both of us in sorting out a false trail I hope. Even in original records there will be puzzling mistakes. Like grandpa spelling his mother's maiden name on his social security application a little different from the way she wrote it in her bible, or a marriage recorded using a long-since-discarded "nick-name" which I would have never known about if my mother had not been here to explain, or a grandparents birthplace being guessed at by the child answering the census taker. Errors easy to work around when the people involved are still available but very difficult for future researchers seeking documented proof. My opinion is that information on the internet is a wonderful tool but not the only one which must be used. -- posted by plox
Please follow the guidelines set forth in the Suite101 Posting Etiquette when adding to the discussion. |
|
|
|
