Since I lost a couple of years of research last summer when my computer and the CD backup disk decided to have their own minds, I have been re-researching the various family lines in my husband's family and my own family. This afternoon as I was searching for information in the census and recording it, it dawned on me that there may be times when sources we consider to be very reliable are not as reliable as we have always thought or want them to be. I'm sure most of us have either heard or said "X said this and they would never lie (or tell stories) about the family". And then we all have looked at or found the one gold mine 'the family Bible' and there in the family pages are entries we need for our research. However...how reliable are the stories we've heard or re-told and the information in the family Bible? I'm like everyone else, we want to believe that our older relatives would never lead us astray in any way, but we all know that they do - maybe not purposely, but they do by their spoken and/or written words. But there are three questions we need to ask ourselves in order to help our research - Who told the story and when was it first told? Who wrote the information in the family Bible and when? How was the mentality of our relative at the time the information was told or written? There are many in their later years who are diagnosed with Alzheimer's. Years ago it was simply recorded as 'old age' or 'senile' or in some cases 'crazy' and people just accepted it as part of the aging process of life. Today, the medical profession claim that they can try to narrow the time down to a few years of when it first started, but everyone knows that a person can have a medical problem for years before it is diagnosed simply because it was dormant or in remission for a while or simply not diagnosed or worse yet the family did not want to acknowledge there was a problem and di nothing about it until it was too late. When we hear a story or have the Bible's family pages at our disposal, we need to research the information before we say that it is a good source for our research. Sometimes a story or the family info in the Bible could have been from a member of an earlier generation who might have had a memory problem at the time and no one knew it. And even if the person had good mental health, they could have told the story correctly but a younger generation is now passing it on with a few keys words missing and thus changing the story. I know that one person told me a story once that was true except for the generation that it occurred in. She claimed that the story occurred about 4 or 5 generations before her husband, when in reality the story was actually about her father-in-law and what he did - changed the spelling of the surname after he and two of his brothers got into a family squabble. And in another case a person wrote the family info in the family Bible and even though was considered to be in good mental health she had screwed up a good 25% of it. Sadly she considered herself the foremost authority in the family although she did not ever do any research. She simply based everything on what she had heard from relatives years before and didn't bother to make sure she had her facts right before recording them. She meant well, but let's face it, that family Bible is now considered "unrealiable". As I look back, I get the feeling that the woman had an undiagnosed stroke which resulted in some memory problems. So when you're thinking about or reading the story by X or looking at the family Bible, use the information with some caution. When we find the truth, it may not what we or others want it to be, but we have to make sure that the errors in our history are corrected. Debbi Geer __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com