Hi folks! I know some of you on a few lists are tired of hearing from me, I'm sorry, but this is too important not to send. I believe I may have sent something on this before, but can't remember right off hand, and since this is fresh in my mind, I want to send it now, because even if I did send it before, we have new members to the list who may not be aware. It was recently brought to my attention that there is a new site called fakefamily that created a software program that produces fake genealogy family trees and posts them to the web. The purpose of this is to bring advertising revenues to websites. There are sites who use advertisers, such as google (like on my page) or private advertisers to bring revenue. Many of us who use it do so to help pay for a legitimate site (like me), but some abuse the set up and have created these fake family trees, google and yahoo put them in their search engine as a genealogy website, and then when folks search for genealogy sites, these come up with completely bogus families only to bring users to the site and earn money in a very underhanded way, and in my opinion, unethical! This is a potentially huge threat to internet genealogy! The reason being that, especially for beginning genealogists, they find names online, and take it for granted that everything is correct and they never verify the information for themselves. The guy who created this software is well aware of this and has no sympathy for that happening with one of his fakefamilies. I want to take this opportunity to press upon you the importance of verifying EVERYthing you come across with genealogy and even history in general, with primary documents (birth, marriage, death certificates, court cases, etc.) rather than secondary sources (books, word of mouth, websites, etc). I want to share with you something from my own experience and maybe you can see why I advocate that so much. First, realize I'm not saying that folks are lying or trying to mislead, in most cases it is that there was a misinterpretation of the primary document, or something that went generation to generation and hadn't been verfied. Back in the fall of 2000, I began a project documenting free African Americans in antebellum North Carolina. At the beginning of the project, 75% of my sources were books or articles. In everything I saw that was previously published, particularly in Ira Berlin's Slaves Without Masters and Dr. John Hope Franklin's the Free Negro in North Carolina 1790-1860, it was stated that NC was the first state to pass a law that required free blacks to register, and in one source, it stated that it opened the doors for states lik VA and SC to pass similar laws. Well, I took this for granted that it was fact. I figured if it came from Ira Berlin or Dr. Franklin, the authorities on the subject, it must be true! 2 years ago, I decided to start looking at what all the laws in NC regarding free blacks actually said and what I found surprised me! I made copies of everything I found in the archives of everything law that mentioned anyone who was black, whether slave or fr! ee, and went home to read over it. I found the law these authors had written about and found out they were wrong! The law was not statewise as one source claimed, the law only applied to 4 specific towns (Edenton, Fayetteville, Washington, and Wilmington for those who wanted to know) and no where else in the state. I thought long and hard about how these authors could have been so wrong and I came to 2 conclusions. Either 1, they never actually saw the law for themself or 2 they misinterpreted it, although I can't see how, it's pretty clear. I think what happened is that during the Reconstruction era, an author who was the first to write anything about free blacks in the south, had said that NC was the first to pass this law statewide and these subsequent authors then just took what he said as fact without checking. If I had not checked on this law, the whole thesis of my paper for that class would have been fiction! It also helped genealogically because I kept searching for registers of free blacks and couldn't understand why I couldn't find any! Now I know. Another example, I know of a group of researchers who hired a professional genealogist to do some research for them. After researching, he claimed that they were descended from a certain woman who married their ancestor that as far as I can tell was based on a sentence in this woman's will. This group and others took it as fact because this is what the professional had said. They spent a good number of years, 20, 30, on trying to go back further on this family and never got anywhere. One of the newer researchers to the line decided to work on their ancestors wife instead and look at who her ancestors were. During the process she discovered that the professional genealogist was actually wrong, that she had married another man with the same last name. Everybody who researched this family completely believed that they were descended from this woman when they really weren't and it was because no one bothered to go back and look at the documents the professi! onal did and form their own opinion. When you have a professional do research, they *should* always cite all their sources and leave a paper trail so you can go back and see the same documents for yourself, besides the fact that yu are paying them to find your ancestor, you are also paying them to find those documents and if they don't give you copies of the documents, they should at least tell you what they were and how to get them yourself. It's always a good idea that if you don't have the copies yourself, you need to get them to verify. Ok, this is getting really long, but I hope that you all see where I was trying to go with the importance of verifying your information, especially with folks like this fakefamily.com that make internet research for genealogy less and less reliable. If you want to read some about the fakefamily site, here is a link. http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,635160683,00.html Good luck everyone in your research! Erin Erin Bradford eabradfo@yahoo.com List manager http://www.ncalhn.org ALHN County Coordinator for multiple NC Counties http://www.gendepository.com (the Genealogy Depository-Barringer, Black, Bradford, Coventry, Eller, Hackett, Hupp, and Kern)