I agree with Roger on this... I have used a lot of information from other researchers, especially on their particular lineage from the one I am working on, and in the beginning only have the paper copy with their name (or in notes) but now I am putting in as sources too. Most of the internet (web page) information I use is marriages, census and abstracts of deeds, other documents and cemetery information. I do not use whole family trees unless I can find documentation of some sort to support most of it, especially my direct lineage. It is a sharing community and one of the best, but just be careful and do a little checking. Rose ----- Original Message ----- From: RAHart3@aol.com Sent: Friday, January 04, 2002 12:09 PM To: NCLENOIR-L@rootsweb.com Subject: [NCLENOIR] Sharing Work Martha, I read the article Using others Work, in Rootsweb Digest and again in your Lenoir Digest. While I agree in principle, I don't agree in practice. I have spent over 30 years researching my Hart family and have over 16,000 names in my family file. I may have found ten percent of them or less. Most of the others are from e-mail or family trees submitted to me by other researchers willing to share. I don't have time left in my life to read all the Court minutes from all the Counties in all the States, nor do I want to scroll through all the Census data at the Genealogy Library. I have no intention of trying to reinvent the wheel every time I enter some data. What I do instead is to give credit in my notes to the person who shared their data with me. Most often they are not the one who read the census and obtained the information, but they are the ones who shared it with me. Going back to them I can help them correct errors, or find the original source. In my opinion the single most important purpose in our Genealogical research is to get it right. The only way we can do that is to take conflicting information from many sources, then try to discover which is most accurate. The second most important objective is to give credit to the persons who have done the work and been willing to share it with us. We are a large community of dedicated researchers who have been more than gracious in sharing the hard work we do. No one individual has the time or the energy to do the work necessary to trace a family line back through the hundreds of clues they left in the file cabinets of history. It is a group effort. Roger