Unreliable Sources

Today I am going to talk about sources once again. If you will refer to my earlier post concerning my husbands 4th Great Grandfather you will notice that I found what looked like a marriage record on a popular Genealogy website. When I found the record I decided to see if there was a copy that I could obtain of it. I pulled up the source listing and found the company that published the database so I contacted them. The gentlemen I spoke to was very nice he told me that he did not know why this particular website had decided to call those records "Marriage Records" and in his own words he admitted that doing so was a misnomer. I asked him for the contact information of the gentleman who had originally submitted the record that was placed into his database.

He was kind enough to send me the file and he went on to tell me that if it did not help me then I was not obligated to pay for it. Let me say if you have read my earlier post then you know that I suspected in all likelihood this information came from someones family group sheet. So, sure enough what he sent me when I ordered the "Marriage Record" was just someones Gedcom file. It was full of names and dates and the person whose record I was searching for did not have any sources listed at all. This gentlemen assured me when I first contacted him that his database was compiled with information taken from "serious genealogical researchers". I am thinking to myself, they must not have been too serious given the fact they failed to cite sources. So it appears to me that that particular database is likely filled with family group sheets and Gedcoms from other submitters. One could easily compile such a database by downloading Gedcoms off the internet!! I have not had time to check out the rest of the file he sent to see if there was anything else in there, but from what I read that was useless to me! The service charges $7.95 per page!

This file is just someone elses words and there is nothing contained within it to back up the claims. I think that these Genealogical places out here that charge subscription fees to their users should be more conscientious and thorough with what they include in their database. In the end it is going to really be up to us as researchers to check out each source before we just add something to our tree. Let this be an example to research and then research some more and be sure to cite your sources! Lesson learned!