16 December 2020

Unreliable Sources

I've been a member of Ancestry .com for years. It's a great source of information, via the many collections of records that have been digitized and made available for online reasearch.

However, not all records are equally good. As discussed previously, errors often creep into official records. Particularly faulty, it seems, are unofficial records. Ancestry allows users to upload their own family trees and share them with other members. Unfortunately, these trees are often filled with misinformation, lies, and fantasies. I limit my use of these trees to the records that are sourced, and then I check the source myself. Without a source, it seems that many of the people creating these trees are just inventing things.