Head Hunters

There’s a saying in computers garbage in garbage out. Basically it means if you put in erroneous data you’ll get out erroneous data. The same sort of thing happens with genealogy. Poor research equals poor family trees.

                  As an amateur genealogist I’ve been utterly amazed at just how much junk genealogy there is, especially on the Net. Like many who are researching their family tree I use Rootsweb World Connect. However most genealogies on it – I would roughly guess at least 60% and these are of the ones with sources. - are very poorly done. These are people whose goal seems solely to collect the names of real or imagined ancestors. I call them “head hunters”.

                  Frequently what they do is copy gedcoms. This becomes very frustrating when you’re looking for sources and see nothing but gedcoms as the source. So if there is a mistake in a date they all make the same mistake. One such set of mistakes had one man married to two women with the same last name on the same day in the 1600s. I didn’t count how many times that had been copied.

                  There are those who have people born in a place that didn’t exist at the time, like Massachusetts in the 1590s. One genealogy had a woman giving birth to children after she had died. Other genealogies corrected the mistake by saying the woman had died sometime after the date the others listed as her death.

Some people, it seems, are too lazy or just too blind to do something as fundamental as double checking at least some of their facts. Twice I’ve come across ancestors of mine who were supposedly the son of a Mayflower passenger. A quick check taking no more than about two or three minutes discovered they weren’t. (Incidentally I really do descend from two Mayflower passengers – William Brewster and his wife Mary. This has been verified through good genealogy.)

                  My favorite horrific mistake is the genealogy that had one woman married to a man who was born about 15 years after she died and having children by him in the 1400s. I didn’t know they could freeze embryos then.

                  To be fair we all make careless and honest mistakes. We transpose a letter or a date here and another one there. We get people mixed up.

                  One of the most common types of honest mistakes are confusing two people with the same name. I have one ancestor whose name is John Proctor married to a Martha Harper who went from England to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1630s. Around the same time another John Proctor possibly married to an Allis Graye went from England to the Virginia Colony. The two are frequently confused. It took me a little digging to finally figure this out.

                  However, most mistakes can be found by simply keeping your eyes open for what does not make sense and then by doing a little digging. Usually all it takes is an hour or two of research, which too many people seem unwilling to do. So open your eyes people.