Back when I was a beginner, I trusted. A lot. I believed everyone out there doing genealogy on the same families as me had been doing it longer and therefore must know more than I did, must have found the records already, and therefore their pedigrees, family group sheets, and trees posted online were correct.

What a sweet summer child I was!

Every day I see trees full of … how shall I say it nicely…? Garbage? Is that too harsh? I don’t mean to disparage anyone who is a beginner. Not at all. But I am criticizing myself a little bit. And I am definitely admonishing those that don’t go back and review their work. Especially before posting it to a public tree where thousands of beginners like me just blindly copy that garbage. For example, why didn’t I notice that someone found in the 1880 census couldn’t have died in 1876? (This is a mistake I am literally fixing at this very moment in my own database.)

I came to realize that many family historians out there didn’t know more than I did. They too were flailing around trying to grasp on to any information to fill a hole in their tree.

Again, I don’t mean to be harsh. We all started somewhere. And we all didn’t necessarily understand how invasive and far-reaching the internet would be when we posted those trees with less than accurate information on them. I know, from Facebook groups I’m in and discussions with colleagues, even NGSQ articles working to correct mistakes, that I’m not the only one dealing with this phenomenon.

One thing I did several years ago to help mitigate this problem, was I made my research tree private at Ancestry. So, all of my “garbage” work wouldn’t be copied again. That doesn’t stop the copying that was already done, but it is something. I then made a clean tree, back five generations, that is public and mostly correct, and just the straight lines (not all of the collaterals), and attached that to my DNA. This allows my DNA matches to see the basic information. But my research tree with all of the mistakes is now not available for public consumption.

By going back through my earlier research is allowing me to find these mistakes and rectify them with actual research in DOCUMENTS, not just believing someone’s tree like I did in my early days.