As I find a new normalcy from the events over the past year I have decided to revive my genealogy blog. As a genealogist I have learned many important Do’s and Don’tsover the years from a wide range of genealogists. These lessons have caused me to ‘Start Over’ and re-create my tree.
I started my journey (my husband will say my addiction) as a genealogist at the beginning of 1999 when my sister, Sharon, reached out to me and asked if I would like to work with her and continue the genealogy our parents started. Sharon chose my mother’s side and this left my father’s side for me. The work my parents had accumulated, on their respective family lines, was done prior to the internet when they had to contact individuals or government offices by mail or phone to request information. This search could be very time-consuming as the correspondence went back and forth a few times before the requested information was received.
I, excitedly, took the information my father had accumulated and looked at how I could build on it. The first thing I did was to purchase the desktop version of Family Tree Maker from Broderbund and started inputting the information I knew. Through Family Tree Maker I was led to the internet pages of Genealogy.com which I readily started to use, including MyGenealogy, My Home Pages, Family Tree Maker homepages and GenForum message boards. I created the Shaun and Doug Hobson Family homepage which provided a short synopsis of my family and the information and names I was searching in hopes other genealogists would reach out with information.
On 20 February 1999 I created four posts on the Iceland GenForum message board. The four posts documented the information I knew about the four couples who were my eight paternal 2x great-grandparents that immigrated from Iceland to Canada. Within a week of these postings I had received information on three of the four couples allowing me to take my ancestral lines back many generations.
I started entering the names of these people in my family tree and it was expanding quickly. I soon uploaded my tree to the Internet to increase the chance that I could connect to relatives and find new individuals and obtain more information about branches of my tree. I searched for records and merged them to the people in my tree. Some of the records and material I found came from the public trees of others and I merged them. My tree grew and soon I had over 8,000 individuals.
Some of the individuals I added to my tree were participants in historical events, legendary Viking kings, mythical gods, and even minor King of Ireland, that has an associated record, that took me back to Adam and Eve.
My first thought was this is easy, my research is done! Was it done? No, not by a long shot!
I wish my learning and understanding of the standards of genealogy equaled the growth of my family tree. However, that was not the case and by the time I recognized I had not properly researched every individual I added to my tree and supported these individuals with accurate source records I had too many people in my tree to try and correct. This led me to starting over in 2016.
I created a new tree starting with me and adding people one by one. As I add a person I attach records to support their existence and connection to my tree. As the public trees of others provides me with records and/or information about a shared individual or new members to add to my tree I take that information with caution. Before I will add the records of others to my tree I need to first confirm the records identify the correct information for the person I have in my tree — there can be more than one individual in the same area with the same name and about the same age.
I, sadly, am no longer surprised with the number of public trees that suggest we share an individual only to look at their tree and find obvious errors in their tree. Sometime they wrongly connected their family to my relative or they connected our shared relative to the wrong family. How can this happen! It can happen easily as I found out myself when I wasn’t following the standards of genealogy.
As I have uploaded my public tree to Ancestry.com this is where I will find suggested hints. I have found that I can frequently get hints to records that are not connected to my relative, but are connected to the wrong individual in the public trees of others. This results in me taking more time to slowly check the records until I find the correct one for my individual. How can this happen! It happens, I believe, because the algorithm Ancestry.com uses to create these suggested hints is based on the number of times a specific hint is attached to an individual. As people believe the hint and attach it to their tree without verifying its accuracy and this is done over and over by many people then it won’t take long for the Ancestry.com algorithm to suggest this inaccurate record matches my individual.
Since I started my ‘Do-Over’ tree I have built it out to about 2400 individuals. My search for records includes internet genealogy sites, such as, Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org, but it also includes cemeteries, census records, church records, immigration records, land records, newspapers, obituaries, passenger records, vital statistics, war records, and personal documents held by family members, to name a few. Yes, proper research does slow down the building of a family tree, but I believe it is more important to have a correct family tree than a large tree with many inaccuracies. As my profile on Ancestry.com says, “Genealogy without sources is Mythology”.Now to find out if I actually have individuals in my tree who were participants in historical events, legendary Viking kings or mythical gods, and if my line can be correctly documented back to Adam and Eve.