Anyone doing family history and genealogy research online for any length of time will notice one very important thing - there is a LOT of misinformation out there. It is imperative, therefore, to make a point of always verifying the information. Online genealogy sites such as Ancestry.com have made it incredibly easy to find other family trees which include your ancestors and to add that information to your own tree. But, unfortunately, a lot of this information is wrong.
Examples of Erroneous Information in Genealogical Data
A general perusal of online family trees, whether posted on websites or on the shared family tree sites will easily reveal problems that can be detected if one just looks at the data closely. One thing that is often noticed is a record of someone having children whose birth dates are either before their parents were old enough to have them or after their parents were passed away. Another example is a birthplace being stated that cannot possibly be true. This happens a lot when researching ancestors from the Pilgrim era. Birthplaces are often given as being the same as the place where it was known they lived or died. But they could not possibly have been born in Massachusetts in 1598, as the Mayflower didn't arrive until 1620.
These are the kinds of things that can be easily discovered by just looking closely at the information you are adding to your tree, and removing or flagging those things for future research and correction. But other misinformation and inconsistencies exist as well. Children assigned to one set of parents may well belong to another, and very often one or more children assigned to a family don't belong there at all, or are assigned to the wrong wife of the father. An ancestor might be assigned a set of parents that further research reveals to be inaccurate. These kinds of errors cannot be discovered just at a glance, they require research of your own.
How Misinformation Gets Into Genealogical Data
How does this misinformation get included in the records in the first place? Some of it, maybe much of it given the nature of the online databases, can be attributed to sloppy research. People add things to their own trees without verifying it themselves and it eventually gets perpetuated and phased into dozens of other trees.
However, some of it comes from sources that you may at first consider reliable. During the 1800s genealogy began to be taken up by family historians in earnest. These people did not have the resources at their fingertips that are available now. They had to go to the source records, or spend months and even years corresponding with someone who had access to them. So they can be forgiven if they got some things wrong, which they did. But it still presents a problem for researchers today, because their erroneous conclusions are now available to thousands of people through the magic of the internet. Many of the books and histories written by these historians are now old enough to be out of copyright, and so are being electronically scanned and made available online. If they included erroneous data, it was picked up by modern researchers and added into online databases, or put into one family tree, only to be perpetuated by others.
Suggestions For Verifying Genealogical Information
All of this illustrates how very important it is to verify all pertinent information however possible from primary sources, much of which is now available on the internet. Town and church records are excellent for this. If the ancestors in question were Quakers, they were probably mentioned in meeting records somewhere. Sometimes finding the truth can only be done by comparing numerous records, and making logical deductions from them. Without doing this, you may be accepting a false family history, which defeats the purpose of doing genealogy in the first place.
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