Genealogy Research on the Internet
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The internet is one of the latest and greatest new tools in our genealogical research and can be used to offer us:
~People and places to learn from.
~Meeting of the minds, people to assist us and places to discuss our research.
~A place to publish your conclusions, in many cases free of charge.A few of the things it won’t give you however are absolute conclusions, always reliable data and access to everything you want. No matter how powerful a tool, it isn’t infallible. One of the real issues that I see with internet use is that it tends to be accepted in many cases, particularly by newcomers to the ancestry hunt, as the be all and end all because there are so many places to hunt online.
It isn’t out of the question however that some of the information that you find online is in many cases not reliable or just plain wrong. This leaves questions as to how it gets here, why it continues to be used and whether in fact you can rely on the internet as a tool at all. The answer is yes of course, because you are the final judge as to how reliable the information is and if you use it at all.
Several mailing lists offered a theory that bad data being entered into play, drives out the good data, in a Greshams economic law type way, (old bad coinage drives the good money out of circulation) and to a point that is true. No matter how many times or how many years ago a certain correction appears for an error, the error seems to travel faster, and to appear more often so that the correction never entirely catches up with it. For this reason, many older researchers refuse to use, or are biased against the internet as a tool for their research, however, the problem isn’t limited to the internet but is prolific in printed media as well.
Long before the internet became an item in research or was able to be used to get you in touch with Uncle johns great aunt Marth, volumes and volumes of printed material came out and were the items of choice at the public library, yet many of them, most noteably, series like Frederick Virkus’ Compendium of American Genealogy, had published things which were submitted to them by subscribers, and they were, simply put, as unreliable as even the most heinous eror that could be found on the internet today.
The difference is that a famed book of conclusions and family trees, in most peoples minds, particularly an expensive book, won’t be party to errors .. will it??
The simple fact is that anything at all is subject to erroneous conclusions and information, which is where the human factor, the researcher who is willing to keep digging to get the right information comes in.
Don’t count out any source of information, interaction, or materials and do check it all out thoroughly and discount those things that don’t make sense to you. The internet, like any other tool, isn’t perfect, but it does add one more thing to your research arsenal.
October 5th, 2009 at 2:25 pm
A distant aunt of mine was a genealogist and traced my mother’s family–no one has a record of this document–Is there someplace where she might have recorded this history??