AVOIDING THE PITFALLS
How many of my genealogist top 10 sins have you committed while carrying out your family history research?
Most of us have done it, got carried away researching several different lines of our family tree at once, or feeling tempted to click on an online match, to add an ancestor to our tree, without checking the facts.
Whether you are a newbie, intermediary, or a professional, I am sure you will have made some of these mistakes yourself – but sometimes mistakes become habits, and ones that are very hard to break.
So let’s begin with examining the pitfalls and mistakes that most of us will have made at least once in our research and look at ways in which we can avoid making those same errors again.
If you follow my regular blog on the Family Tree magazine website at www.family-tree.co.uk you would have seen earlier in the year, my blog on this very subject. In this article I would like to take that one step further and help you to develop the skills to avoid making these mistakes in the first place.
So here are my top 10 sins of a genealogist and how to avoid them!
Sin 1: Assuming everything you find online is correct
The number one mistake that a lot of people make is the assumption that everything you find online ‘must be correct’. Unfortunately a lot of what you will find online will potentially have errors, whether they are simple transcription mistakes, from a subscription website, to completely uncorroborated trees. So be warned! Never just ‘cut and paste’ information into your tree, you need to confirm the details yourself, via various sources, before you include it in your tree. The Genealogical Proof Standard (GPS) is the Holy Grail for all genealogists to prove a genealogical conclusion, with as much certainty as possible.
How to repent
Be mindful of those supposed helpful ‘hints’ if you have your tree online. Before you accept that information you need to prove the new fact, as far as is reasonably practical – do not just accept the new fact on face value. You will hear or read that the Genealogical Proof Standard is the recognised standard that a genealogist should use to prove a fact, but what does that actually mean in laymen’s terms?