Retracing Your Steps

Today I want to write about a few things that I wish every budding Genealogist would take to heart. It is one of those situations where you say: "Do as I say, not as I do" so to speak. I have been researching my family tree since I was a teenager. In the beginning I made quite a lot of mistakes that I now wish I had not have. It has caused me to have to go back to the very beginning of my research and to start over. So, hopefully my learning experience can help someone else not to do the same things that I did when I first started. Let me give you some examples.

The Internet, gotta love it. It is a treasure trove of Genealogical findings just waiting to be captured by anyone willing to take the time to do so. My first mistake was building an online tree and not looking for the sources behind the information that I was gathering. Its so easy to log on to any popular website and see that someone else has started a tree and from the looks of it, most of your work is already done for you; at least enough to get started. How very wrong that line of thinking is! So, like a lot of new researchers for want of a better term, I logged on, saw a tree and merged the information into my own. I created a huge tree. Sad to say that now I am back to square one and going through each piece of information that I collected and verifying it one by one. Oh how much time I would have saved if I had done that in the first place! No matter how tempting it might be, do not do it! So, I started a new tree, from the beginning and am in the process of building it and sourcing it. If I cannot back up what I find with a source, it does not get added to my tree. I also no longer merge anyone elses info in my tree.

Now, with that being said, not everyone who has information in their trees has wrong information. What I do in my ancestry profile is to click and hide those hints. The hints are still there and you can find them under the hidden link. I look at them from time to time and see if any of the information fits into what I have found. If it does, I still do not merge the tree, instead, I add the information on my own along with the source.

There is a wonderful video course out there that is Free and it talks about this very subject. I am posting the link here in this post in case you would like to take advantage of it. In my free time I am slowly going over the videos on the site and learning. When one first begins its enticing to just want to jump right in and get both feet wet. Let me just say it is much easier if you do it right the first time. In this case, Do as I say, not as I did!

If I`d Only Known-Beginner Genealogy Mistakes