IIGS™ Newsletter - February 2000
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IIGS™ Newsletter - February 2000
I have a new wrinkle in Bad Genealogy for you! Person, let us call her Susie, researches the Drudgery Family. She has not looked at vital records or census or estate records; she has not found family bibles or cemetery headstones or church records.But she has been all over the Internet. She has downloaded everything from the AF and from World Family Tree and from Ancestry.com and from maillists that she can find on the Drudgery Family and she has combined them all into one huge mess---and called it "genealogy."
After compiling her highly suspect genealogy, she posts a message to Special Interest List One. The message includes her lengthy (and often redundant, often with outrageously impossible dates) Drudgery Descendant Chart.
Several folks read her posting and write in. They point out that Henry Drudgery, born 1623, cannot be the father of Joe born 1796. They point out that Rachel Drudgery could not have married John Workhorse in 1824 since Rachel died in 1813. They also note that she couldn't possibly have married again to Kevin Arbeiter who was born in 1857. They tell her about the New York State Archives where the proof of Jack Drudgery's change of name in 1822 from Jacob Dummy exists, proving that he cannot be the son of Lionel Drudgery.
They tell her of the massive research work, "The Drudgerys of America," and a host of other resources. And they gently chide her for her "research" technique, warning her that just because information appears on the Internet does not make it true. They caution her against accepting information from such diverse sources without further investigation. And they warn her about combining families of the same name without proof.
She disappears off the list for a while.
When she returns, she has a new chart - with the same errors, but with a slew of citations!
The new citations read like a doctoral dissertation! All families listed in the chart have footnotes pointing to primary sources, a huge number of secondary sources, and a couple of quotes from tertiary sources.
Wow! What a job Susie did! But wait - why then does she still have all those errors? She still shows Joe's birth year as 1796, although she also shows Joe as the son of Henry who was born in 1623. She also still has those duplicates, still has the deceased Rachel marrying two husbands, etc.
Simple, as a fellow Drudgery researcher points out: She merely scanned in the footnotes from the aforementioned "Drudgerys of America," and plunked them in wherever she thought they might fit.
She never looked at any of those sources, never checked to see if she had attached the notes to the right person, nothing. Just copied the sources from a book, and claimed them as her own. These unwitting sources now seem to indicate that the sloppy conglomeration of accumulated, but erroneous data is verified!
And that, my friend, is what makes serious genealogists throw up their hands in despair! The story I just recounted is an example of some of the unethical practices pervading the Internet and the genealogical community today.