Tree Trauma

 

How many times when you find a family tree online which contains your mystery ancestor do you race to see where that researcher found the secret stash of tell-all documents—only to discover a very obvious case of mistaken identity? That's likely happened to all of us, for I can't count the number of times I've spotted comments about the disappointment of realizing such mistakes.

No sense in lapsing into tree trauma over this unfortunate situation, though. Anyone who knows how to research our own family history can certainly put those same skills to work in evaluating the quality of another researcher's work.

That's the kind of viewpoint I carry with me into the pages of century-old genealogy books, and it can work just as well when evaluating the work of fellow subscribers to today's online services like Ancestry.com or MyHeritage, too. Any genealogy service which allows us to pull up documents equips us with the tools we need to make such evaluations for ourselves.

Finding verification in documents may be key, but once we find the document to inspect, actually looking at the document, rather than relying solely on the transcription, can go so much farther in helping confirm or reject another researcher's family history assertions. No document showing in the tree you're viewing? Run the specific point in the tree through a search process for yourself—even on another person's tree, you can do that at Ancestry, sometimes with eye-opening revelations on trees which had no previous verification.

There are, of course, the inevitable situations which seem to slip through the research cracks. A birth and death which happened in between two census years, for instance, can make it seem like nothing serious happened in the family at all that decade, simply because we didn't know to look elsewhere for any signs of tragedy.

Sometimes, a part of a family's history might be known only to those who lived through that particular family's circumstances at the time. Yesterday, reader—and blogger, too—Miss Merry commented on how her grandfather was raised by his grandmother after his parents both died young, and yet the census enumerators recorded their relationship wrong, thus becoming the likely source of misinformation in other  trees online connected to her grandfather's family. She commented, "I know the true story as a direct descendant." But would a distant cousin have realized the problem?

Though we sometimes complain about scrambled information on some family trees posted online, I've realized what Miss Merry mentioned provides us with some guidance. Yes, people can get information wrong on their own family tree—but it is usually concerning more distant relationships. If I'm in doubt concerning a tree at, say, Ancestry.com, I'll click on the view that lets me see the pedigree leading to the "home" person. If the relative in question is a fairly close family member, I'm more likely to trust a subscriber's assertion on that tree than, say, a claim about a fifth or sixth cousin.

Even better yet, some online subscribers are not only adding documentation to their tree from records accessible through services such as Ancestry.com, but adding documents from their own family's personal collections. I've seen photos of entries from old family Bibles, or inscriptions from backs of old family photographs. In one instance I ran across this past week in working on my Carter DNA matches, one man explained the source of confusion in his line. Posting a copy of his father's obituary, he explained that after his dad divorced his mom, he married another woman by the same name. Of course, those who didn't know those details might have thought that the second woman was the son's mother, but she wasn't. By his sharing the document plus his comment—and because he was so closely involved in that aspect of his family's history—it helped guide other researchers away from mistaken assumptions.

Face it, whether we are using century-old genealogy books as our guide, or trying to make sense of our family history from trees posted online in this current decade, we're going to find mistakes. Always go into this research process with eyes wide open.  Anyone can make mistakes, even governmental record-keepers. Avoid tree trauma: do your own follow-up by seeking out documentation to confirm and double check any assertions made by other researchers, no matter who they are or where they shared their family tree.