“Why should I hire somebody? I plugged in my grandparents on Ancestry.com and it filled in my lineage all the way back to Jesus! I’m done, right?”
On its face, genealogy seems to be pretty easy these days, with online sites like Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org. These sites connect you to other people with family trees and combine the data. In a few simple clicks, you may be able to connect your tree out several generations. The problem is, so many of those shared trees the software is linking your family to are riddled with errors. Someone populates a tree with information they’ve heard from a great aunt, then clicks on a bunch of Ancestry’s “hints” with information that may or may not be for the same person, adds it to their own tree without verifying the data, and then that error gets replicated from tree to tree to tree.
The world of genealogy is rife with misinformation. Take my own family history. My grandmother’s maiden name was Lantz. I found a published genealogy of the same Lantz family when I was first starting to do research decades ago. In it, the author had tracked the family back to King George 1 of England. Because of this book, that knowledge was common in my family, and I’d heard about it growing up. But the book was wrong. As was almost every tree on Ancestry.com. The error was a confusion over an ancestor, William Woodford. With extensive, meticulous research, I discovered that our family’s ancestor was Private William Woodford, who fought in the American Revolution. The book, and all the Ancestry trees, incorrectly positioned General William Woodford (of the British forces) as the correct ancestor. General William Woodford’s line does go back to King George, but he and Private Woodford were not related – at least not in any way so far uncovered. It was a simple mistake of confusing the biographies of two men with the same name – and it’s a mistake that happens thousands and thousands of times in Ancestry.com family trees.
In the 1850 U.S. Census of Barbour County, West Virginia, there are three individuals enumerated with the name “Adam Coontz”. One is only ten years old, but the other two are in their mid-20’s, married farmers with children. I can’t tell you how many family trees I’ve run into that have overlapped both families, and included children from the two separate marriages into a single family. It’s a careless mistake, but also a simple error to make.
Genealogy is like playing guitar, or writing poetry. It’s all about the practice and the training. In my case, I spent twelve years in college, learning the ins and outs of academic research. I’m university trained in historical research. And I still had a lot to learn about genealogy when I began. I’ve buried myself in books, attended seminars and spent countless hours doing painstaking research, reading centuries-old church records and transcribing old penmanship. Experience builds expertise, and maybe that can help you break through with your own research.
