ROOTS-L Archives
Archiver > ROOTS > 2009-11 > 1258962390
From: "Kirsten Bowman" <>
Subject: Re: [ROOTS-L] Ancestry.com subscriptions
Date: Sun, 22 Nov 2009 23:46:30 -0800
In-Reply-To: <20091122161547.ZOIBN.37849.imail@fed1rmwml4101>
Pat:
I use exactly the opposite approach from yours. When tackling a new family
group, the *first* place I look is RootsWeb's WorldConnect to see if anyone
else has researched them. I look especially for trees that have notes or
sources and to see what family members, children, and spouses they have
listed. My research is primarily in Ontario ca 1783-1900 and most of the
time I find at least part of the family I'm looking for. Then it's often a
simple matter to search Ancestry for census and birth/marriage/death records
and often expand on what I found. If I can't verify the information, it
doesn't get added to my database. If I can verify it, it gets added with a
source citation.
I think either method is valid as long as we're very careful about not
making assumptions based on someone else's assumptions.
Kirsten
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Subject: Re: [ROOTS-L] Ancestry.com subscriptions
I use Ancestry.com, HeritageQuest.com, Footnote.com, GenealogyBank.com,
Rootsweb, and a dozen other resources.
In looking for a particular line, I BEGIN with the readily available
documentation, working backward through censuses, newspapers, birth/death
records, land records.
Only when I've pretty well exhausted my current resources (short of writing
letters), do I look at the "trees" found on these sites. And, then, only to
get some ideas -- e.g., it's interesting that, having found in the 1850
census my Jane Dowe has a sister Ellen Dowe, I find a tree with Ellen Doe,
with similar parents, but a different spelling of the name. No sign of
Jane, but then, the "creator" of this tree wasn't researching Jane, s/he was
researching Ellen Dowe.
I rarely will look for a person in a published tree (and that includes all
the books and monographs published before the internet made it so easy)
early in the "game." I have found that it colors my thinking, and may lead
me astray.
Of course we'd all like these trees to provide their sources -- wouldn' it
be loverly? -- so we could "check" their work, or go further with our
research, but frankly, I don't see the "old" published genealogies
spectacular in their citations either. So, citations to these sources that
have no sources aren't any more helpful than no citations at all.
I, like others, stay away from "OneWorldTree" because I don't find it to be
helpful, but you should know that every tree there has, in the lower right
corner, a listing of the trees that were searched to come up with the
"common" elements.
It is possible, I suppose, that "someone" at Ancestry found a "box" of old
trees and re-published them, but when a tree has been removed from the site,
it is much more likely that someone, an end user, copied the tree down while
it was up, merged it with his/her information (or not) and up-loaded it with
another name. Only way to tell is to go to the tree and see whose name is on
it as the owner.
When in college, we had a lovely song by Tom Lehrer that began "Plagriarize,
plagiarize. . .
As genealogists, perhaps a better lyric would be:
Verify
let no scrap of paper ever evade your eyes
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes
So, don't bend your eyes
With half-truths and outright lies
But verify, verify, verify!
And, then, you can really call it 'research'
Pat
in Tucson
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