James Tanner wrote in a post today, Learning from our mistakes, about some of the errors he had made in his early research. This post was quite timely for me as over the last few days I have unearthed some errors I made in my early research. I have corrected these and uploaded the amended data to my family site. I imagine that I will continue to find errors as I recheck work done over 20 years ago.
James said " Sometimes we have to "put it out there" and let the critiques fall where they may. If we are wrong. We are wrong. Correct the information and move on." I agree with James. If I waited until I had it right I might never share anything.
My website is a work in progress; people who copy my data to their trees and take as gospel what I have inferred do so at their own peril.
My online tree, unlike a hardcopy document, is dynamic. It changes regularly as new resources come to light or helpful people who are searching for their ancestors find it and offer additions to or corrections of my misinformation. What is of concern is that several people have taken my data and published it in online trees on sites like Ancestry.com and never go back to review or amend their entries.
Be warned - I make mistakes. If you have copy from my tree please do so with caution and always check sources for yourself.
Weekend research means I need to delete about 50 people from by tree as well. It's a shame as I can only replace with 2 people so far. The first group was always a tenuous link but now proved wrong.
ReplyDeleteDitto - I had a 2nd greatgrandparents tree of ancestors and collaterals for my ex-husband... but it turned out to be wrong-wrong-wrong! One of those same-named/same-country-of-origin/same-residence in one early census group of errors. Sigh. And I'd gotten great information which "seemed" to fit quite well. Oh well. Back to the drawing board. Told all my kids/cousins of the error, removed from online tree as well as computer tree.
ReplyDelete