Genealogy and Family History Research - Verifying Your Information

While you are out there trying to do research on your family genealogy, you need to keep in mind one very important thing. There is a lot of misinformation out there, especially in this time of the internet where information flows faster than we can possibly keep up with it.

Most people begin their search by starting a family tree online at places like Ancestry or One Great Family. These are wonderful sources of information, and the larger they get the more likely it is that you can hook onto someone else's tree and all of a sudden discover dozens of ancestors you didn't know of before. But, and this is a big but, you cannot accept all of this as absolute truth. Any family tree that goes back far enough is going to have errors, some of them quite serious ones, and sites like Ancestry are not responsible for making sure the information that is shared is accurate. That is your responsibility.

How Erroneous Data Gets Into the Records

A lot of people get their information from old manuscripts and books that are now out of copyright and being made available on the internet. These people did their research at a time when it was extremely hard to do. They had to go to the source records, or spend months and even years corresponding with someone who had access to them. They did not have the advantage of the mountains of information we do today. So we can forgive them if they got some things wrong, which they did. But it still presents a problem for us today, because their erroneous conclusions are now available to thousands of people through the magic of the internet. People reading this material think they are reading accurate information, and they add that to their trees, and the bad information gets spread around. This is why it is always necessary to go to the source records and verify things for yourself.

Let me give you a recent example I just went through myself. I had traced my ancestry back to a Jedediah Allen, who was born in Sandwich, Massachusetts in 1646. All of the information I was finding indicated he was the son of a Ralph Allen, born in 1615 in England, and the grandson of a George Allen, born in 1568, and who emigrated from England to the colonies in 1635. I had copies of a number of manuscripts and family histories written so long ago as to be out of copyright, plus all the trees on Ancestry had it that way.

So I spent about three weeks happily gathering all the information I could on the Allen family, and there were a lot of them. George had at least 10 children, and it seemed like Ralph had even more. However, as I went along it became apparent that there were actually two Ralph Allens in Sandwich for a number of years, and it was also apparent that both of them were in some way a part of this family. In the Plymouth Colony records there is mention of a Ralph Jr. and a Ralph Sr. But there was no indication that Ralph had named any of his children after himself.

But if this was the case, then which Ralph Allen was my direct ancestor, the father of Jedediah? And which was the son of the George I had spent so much time researching? After another two weeks of intensive research I finally had to come to the conclusion that MY Ralph was the one called Ralph Jr. and that he was NOT the son of George. How disappointing! And the sad thing is, there is no way to quickly spread this information to other people who have the Allens in their trees. People will still find the old sources that are wrong. I know my Ralph is connected to this family somehow, I just don't know how, and I don't think I'm ever going to. (Read more specific details about this fascinating research.)

Examples of Erroneous Information in Genealogical Data

Other mistakes are quite prevalent as well. If you use sites that allow you to add other family trees to your own, you really should at least skim over the people who come into your tree. I constantly find people who had children well after their own deaths, or when they were eight years old. I found one account on a website, written up as a story, so you know the person had to have done at least SOME research. In this account they mentioned the year of death, But two sentences further on they stated that the person was imprisoned two years later for having "Quaker leanings." In working with the Pilgrim era like I do I find that many people list birthplaces as being the same place as somewhere they know their ancestor lived. But people were not born in Massachusetts in 1598. The Pilgrims didn't arrive until 1620.

Suggestions For Verifying Genealogical Information

All of this illustrates how very important it is to verify all your information however you can from primary sources. Town and church records are excellent for this. If your ancestors were Quakers, they were probably in meeting records somewhere. Much of this source material is now available on the internet, and especially sites like Ancestry, where you can search through literally tens of thousands of records for a nominal monthly fee. Sorting out the Ralph Allens could only be done by comparing numerous records, and making logical deductions from them. Without doing this, I would have accepted a false family history. What's the point of doing your genealogy if you don't care be sure of its accuracy?