The Family Tree
By Terence L. Day
Terence L. Day, genealogist and journalist, is on the Washington State University faculty. He welcomes e-mail at genealogy@moscow.com, or regular mail in care of the Tri-City Herald City newsroom, P.O. Box 2608, Tri-Cities, WA 99302-2608.
In genealogy, put your faith in documentation
This story was published Nov. 22, 1998
Every good genealogist has a connection to Missouri, the Show Me State.
The connection may not be genetic, but the attitude definitely is from Missouri. Good genealogists demand proof.
You say Aunt Nellie was three years younger than Uncle Rochester. Show me!
Well, they're hopefully a bit more diplomatic than that, but the truth is Aunt Nell may have been a bit unreliable where certain dates were concerned.
Good genealogists check the written record, documenting who their ancestors were and their place in the family.
Evaluating documents is tricky business. Sometimes it requires a bit of backbone on the part of genealogists who must question the work of others, often a beloved aunt or uncle.
Many accept on faith whatever connections family genealogists have made. Faith has little place in genealogy. Documentation is the standard. Birth certificates. Marriage records. Death certificates. Obituaries. Wills. Deeds. Passports. Census records.
These and many other documents are the foundation of genealogical research. I'm sorry to say that much of the genealogy in the Family History Library computers in Salt Lake City contain little, if any, documentation of links. This is no slam. The folks who run the place will tell you the same and caution that we need to check out the documentation. Don't just accept it on faith.
And that includes what you accept from other genealogists, especially on the Internet.
The Internet with its World Wide Web has done more for genealogy than anything since the invention of microfilm. It has spawned a whole new generation of enthusiastic young genealogists. And many of us gray-haired old geezers have taken to cyber genealogy with every bit as much enthusiasm.
But I fear too much faith is being placed on genealogies that are so readily and eagerly shared via the Internet, or passed between genealogists on computer disks. It's a seductive thing to receive hundreds, even thousands, of new names from some remotely related cousin. The temptation is to assume the work has been correctly done and merge it with our own data.
I hope you won't do that.
We need to carefully examine any data we receive from others. The first thing we should examine after establishing that our lines and theirs link is the quality of their data. How well is it documented?
At the very least, we should make a few spot checks, looking up their references to see if they have properly interpreted and cited them. The truly careful genealogist will walk back through all the documentation.
Surely, this removes some of the fun and excitement of receiving a cyber gift of data because it requires effort on our part. But if the genealogy is accurate, the hardest part has been done. That's finding the sources in the first place.
Family History Centers operated by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are scattered throughout the world. They are staffed by volunteers who will gladly help you learn about proper documentation, and to find the source material you need to check. Much of what they don't have in their own facilities can be ordered on loan from the world's largest genealogical facility, the LDS Family History Library in Salt Lake City.
Then, when future genealogists come across your records, they will find you have abundantly documented your entries.
The proof of genealogical pudding is in the documentation. While in some respects technology is making research and documentation a lot easier than it used to be, in other respects technology is making genealogy more difficult than ever.
This truth is illustrated by a joke currently popular with Internet genealogists. A modern mother is showing the family photo album to her daughter, saying:
"This is the geneticist with your surrogate mother, and here's your sperm donor, and your father's clone. This is me holding you when you were just a little frozen embryo. And this lady with the very troubled look on her face is your aunt, a genealogist."
Yes, there are troubles on the horizon for documenting future generations, so let's do the best job of documenting what is known and knowable.