"The Quest For Accuracy (Part 1)"

A case for two different dates of death

I’m pretty new at this family history stuff, but already I’m noticing some criticisms cropping up here and there about a very popular genealogy web site, one that I have been using quite frequently in recent weeks to aid my research. It’s an extremely slick, professional site and contains a wealth of information, a lot of which is available elsewhere in other places but the idea is to save the researcher from having to travel the world in search of the original copies of all this paperwork.

American, Canadian and British census records and a vast number of birth, baptism, church, marriage, immigration and death related documents are there. It is genuinely amazing to me that so much family history information can be found in one place, and the collection is constantly growing. Once you enter in some of your own personal data and start your family tree, the site will find “hints” throughout their databases that will guide you to online documents and other users’ family trees, and these sources help you fill in missing information for your own tree. The beauty of the site is that it will direct you toward a mountain of data about your ancestors and relatives that has already been compiled by other researchers.

The down side of the site however, is that it will direct you toward a mountain of data about your ancestors and relatives that has already been compiled by other researchers. This is why the criticism exists – it is the Wikipedia of genealogy sites. What you find is not always necessarily accurate information. Even where there are supporting documents – when you have found a church register containing the name John Bertrand for example, you still have to make sure you have the correct John Bertrand. And when the site directs you to review John Bertrand on eleven other family trees all pieced together by different researchers, you may find that John Bertrand had six different birth dates.

The key problem is that it is so easy to retrieve the information, there is a bit of laziness when it comes to verifying it to be true. Sometimes you do have to use your best educated guesses because the supporting documentation just doesn’t exist, but unfortunately a lot of arm chair researchers use their first and only guess.

Amateur genealogists like myself must still strive for as much accuracy as possible. This is all part of the fun – digging and digging until you have irrefutable proof that the date you found is precise. But in some ways, the internet’s way of making everything instantly accessible to the masses seems to be making it more of a challenge to maintain a high level of accuracy in your research.