The Importance of Citing Sources and the Pitfalls of Importing Ancestry.com Trees
Editor’s Note: Joe admits that when he began doing genealogy in Ireland he paid little attention to citing sources, and only later realized that if he wanted to be taken seriously, and wanted people to believe his information, he had to show where it came from. He warns that this is becoming easier and easier to ignore: Ancestry.com sends “hints” that may match a name and date but not the same person, and its user-contributed trees can be helpful for research yet dangerous to import wholesale. The red flag, Joe says, is a tree whose only cited source is other Ancestry trees — errors then take on a life of their own. A cautionary tale for us all.
Transcript
Speakers: WJB — William J. Bowe; JH — Joseph Hart. Transcribed from the recording; punctuation added and obvious mis-hearings corrected.
JH: And so I have to say too that when I started genealogy back in Ireland, I wasn’t paying much attention to citing the sources, and it wasn’t until later that I realized that I really wanted to be serious about it, that I had to do that. I had to show what the sources were. If I wanted people to believe the information that I was providing, I needed to show the sources. That’s something that’s becoming easier and easier to ignore these days.
WJB: Yes. Isn’t that the truth?
JH: To an interesting degree, in that Ancestry — if you post a family tree on Ancestry, they’ll start sifting through their archives, and they will send you hints because the names and maybe the dates match up with one person in your family tree, and they’ll suggest this as a record. Well, it might not be the same person, and so you have to be very discerning —
WJB: Absolutely.
JH: — when you get this free information from Ancestry. Also, Ancestry has all these contributed family trees that can be very helpful when you’re researching, but when you finally want to start plugging people into your family tree, you want to make sure that that connection that you’re making between your family tree and this other family tree are legitimate. And so that’s when you have to be particularly careful about looking at the sources in these other contributed family trees and make sure that’s truly the right person that you’re dealing with in your family tree.
WJB: Yes.
JH: Otherwise, you plug some wrong information into your family tree, and these family trees take on a life of their own. Somebody can . . . And the thing that really makes me say, “Okay, I’m not sure I’m going to believe anything that I see in this family tree,” is that the only source that they have — possibly, I’ve seen some family trees like this where they don’t have any sources except that they say their source is other Ancestry family trees.
WJB: Right.
JH: That means the only thing that they’re accepting into their family tree is something that somebody else contributed, which could be completely wrong.
WJB: Right.
JH: And so —
WJB: A cautionary tale —
JH: Yeah — well, to remind us.
WJB: Okay.
