"Has Ancestry Dot Com Made Us Lazy...?"

[thewideeyedowl]

"Has Ancestry Dot Com Made Us Lazy As Researchers?" is the title of an excellent blogpost found this morning. It explains why we need to beware of Ancestry when researching and the perils of putting a tree online on the site. You will see that it reinforces what has been said on Brit Gen so many times and really should be required reading for anyone using Ancestry (or any of the big sites).

You will find the post if you convert this to an internet address: scottishgenealogytipsntricks dot blogspot.co.uk.

Owl

[Ed McKie]

Rather over egged the pudding I thought and wandered from the point. Nothing that has not been said here over the years over and over. ANC hasn't made "us" lazy because we know about the peril of accepting other people's trees at face value. But that applied when I used to get them in the post. ANC is a great, but somewhat expensive resource, but then is train travel to your nearest record office. All research has to be done properly. End of story. And you still need to go back. Last year some london schools admission registers came on line and I found an entry for my dad in 1904 but nothing for my mum. Had a look at the book again today and decided to browse to see who else went to the same school. Two pages earlier, there was my mum and her twin sister, surname misspelled, but definitely them. Not a transcribed index but register itself misspelt. But then my gran had a somewhat odd way of pronouncing the surname. Nearly a blog this, but the moral is to keep on looking.

[christanel]

In some respects I think it has probably made us more aware that we need to check and double check any information found. Some of the glaringly obvious 'mistakes' on some trees can be a warning to newbie researchers not to take all information at face value whether it is on a public tree, given to us by a fellow researcher or (as Arthur has just found) even on an original document in some cases.

Christina

[David Tuson]

I agree with Christina's comments - I do not trust anything I find on the web until I have been able to prove the information through other means.
During the latter part of 2014 I was working on some PASLEY research and could have quite quickly built a very large family tree. But through digging deeper I found many errors in the information I had collected from various web sites which made me wonder just how many people are simply collecting names without any confirmation of the accuracy. The whole purpose of family history research for me is discovering how my ancestors lived.
Unfortunately some people are repeating those error by happily putting their trees on line. And newbies are lured into believing the data to be correct because they have found multiple trees on the web with the same names linked.

[Guy Etchells]

I agree with the blog, which is why I retweeted the authors tweet to it on Wednesday.
I don't think it goes far enough, as we need to know why the record was created and what it records before we can get the best out of records.

Cheers
Guy