I don't know why I get drawn into the debates over sourced vs non sourced information. They seem to go on and on, or at least they have on other lists. I will offer my own thoughts and experience. First, a irrefutable fact. Every assertion or claim has (or had) a source! One can not exist without the other. The problem I have is when the claim is severed from it's source. I have spent a lot of generally wasted time trying to track down LDS submitters who either had found a record on which they based a claim or simply used some rationale to make their claim. Absent the basis for the claim I can not tell which is the case. The same is true of much of the information on the World Family Tree CD's and many earlier published family genealogy books. Ok, you say, this guy has a keen grasp of the obvious. Well that's true, but it seems to me that the situation will never get better and will probably get worse (since anyone can now "publish" on the internet) if we all do not resolve to stop breaking the link between claim and source. "Source", in the context used above, certainly doesn't only refer to the usual records that lineage societies use to establish a line of descent, but rather the ORIGIN of any claim "as you know it". Simply put, this means we say WHERE we got every claim and bit of evidence, or HOW we reached a conclusion. Sometimes, when I do that with my own analysis, I realize that the conclusion is so feeble that it adds more confusion than it clarifies. I have come to believe that my time is generally better spent corresponding with court clerks, genealogy societies and using genealogy libraries than trying to find the basis of some long since made unsupported claim. The whole concept of genealogy is based on drawing conclusions from evidence. Unless we want everyone else who follows to have to discover the same records we have, then we owe it to them to say what the record said and where we found it. If we are asserting our own conclusion then we need to explain the logic we used. Bill