Mal, Ann, a very distant cousin-by-marriage (is there such a thing?), well, her daughter married a distant Carrel cousin, and spent her retirement years (she is nearly 100 years old now) in the libraries searching for the family of origin of my Carrel ancestor. She failed because the LDS data base she worked with had him born in Massachusetts in 1805 when in reality he was born in western Pennsylvania in 1806. The submitter of the false data to LDS had simply assumed he was born in the same place and at the same time as his wife. NOT! They actually met in Licking County, Ohio in 1826 and married there. Her family had moved from Massachusetts to Ohio when she was a little girl. Poor Ann had wasted thirty years of research in Massachusetts. That false data still indelibly exists in the LDS data base - the one that is submitted by individuals, not the microfilmed documents. Point is that when personally researched family trees are posted on the Internet, appropriated by Ancestry.com, etc., and burned into CDs for sale they become as if sacred writings, even if full of errors, without the possibility of correction as new data is discovered. Folks who willy-nilly merge undocumented family trees into their GEDCOM files are guilty not only of plagiarism but of unknowingly propagating errors. RootsWeb now has the post-em notes, but that's a feeble remedy. Now believe it or not, we have the opposite problem in the new world of Y-DNA testing for genealogy - genetic genealogy. There are surname projects such as for surname Carroll. Participation consists of submitting a DNA sample to a lab, and then posting the results in a data base along with your lineage. But what seems to be happening is that folks submit their DNA results but not their lineage. That subverts the whole concept of finding lost relatives through genetic genealogy. But that is a topic for another mailing list. I say input your family tree to the Internet, but don't download others with tenuous connections to yours, just to make your tree seem bigger than it actually is. Sure, I can prove I am a second cousin to Abraham Lincoln, five times removed, but I would not think of merging his tree into mine, except for our ancestor-in-common. Eric > [Original Message] > From: Mal Humes <mal3@mal.net> > To: <PA-OLD-CHESTER-L@rootsweb.com> > Date: 9/30/2006 7:33:18 AM > Subject: Re: [PaOldC] off the subject......sort of > > RE: > > we have PLENTY of folks who just > > want YOU / US to do all their searching for them, and then credit > > themselve's for putting it all together. ie - all those queries that > > say > > "tell me all you have on such and such" I have myself backed away > > from these questions, and ask for something specific instead. > > And > > >I will admit to having reservations about posting or publishing any of my > genealogical work to >the Internet. But you have to bring something to the > party. > > I know it's easy to be concerned enough about privacy and security of your > data, and I know the feeling that people are just asking others to do their > work and I don't like to encourage it. But I generally find that when I help > even if I can't see the relevant connections to me I find things that are > very interesting and useful. Often I don't see how it's useful until days or > months later. And some of the connections I've made offered payback to those > who did share enough so that I could who their ancestors were. > > I found a graveyard listing on a web site this month that has ancestors from > early 1800s by helping someone who asked me about some indirect connections > to an ancestor of mine that is cited as a witness to a will of their > ancestor in 1866. I almost ignored it because I felt too busy and they > already had a lot more info about the people that they were looking for than > I could find. But then I sent a tree and some info I had where my family had > come from a nearby county and before that. > > They replied with links to some bios of my ancestor and his brother and > father in some online books I hadn't seen yet and that led to a few more in > the Historic Pittsburgh PA collection of books online > <http://digital.library.pitt.edu/fulltext/>. There's clearly some marriages > between a surname in my line that marries into two generations of my family > and what looks like a sibling of a GILCHRIST from my tree line married into > his family. > > By sharing info and asking for more on what they had I was pointed to a > cemetery he said some of the folks on my tree were buried in. I checked and > found comments on that cemetery page from someone who was a clearly related > to the same ancestor as me about 6 generations back. I asked her what she > had on that person and she was able to share some info from a hard to find 6 > volume book on that CALHOUN line that added very well cited and documented > research to add another 5 or 6 generations of history to that branch. > Through the three way exchange this started we all came away with more than > we started with. > > This week I am returning a bible from the 1770's to the a descendant of the > owner, Frederick JORDAN b. 1740. My mother found this in an attic when was a > child in the 1940's, on old Jordan farm, Walnut Hill, in Highspire, PA > (Dauphin County). There is no connection to my Jordan line that we can find > but I was able to identify the family because of shared trees and info > online. It turns out it belonged to the great grandfather of famous > historian and genealogist John Wolf Jordan. Mr. Jordan worked for the > Historical Society of PA and wrote many books about PA. > > Through research shared online I was able to identify someone who is a great > granddaughter of John Wolf Jordan. The bible is going home to the family > after apparently parting with it after the death of someone around 1820. > Even though the last two generations were privatized I was able to tell that > a certain tree had to be from someone from that line and contacted her via > email and offered to return the bible to her family. She's thrilled. We > can't tell if or lines are related but if they are it predates 1740 by a > generation or more. > > I just wanted to share that to offer a good example of why publishing your > family info online can help connect more than just data. I've tracked down > other distant cousins to offer them photographs of mutual ancestors born in > the early 1800's. My grandfather tried to throw these photos away after his > wife died and my sister pulled them out of the trash. I've shared them with > descendants of 3 siblings of my grandmother's great grandmother so they > could see the parents of both sides of that family and the group and single > portraits in an old photo album. > > > > To unsubscribe from this list, please send the one word message, unsubscribe, to > pa-old-chester-request@rootsweb.com > > ------------------------------- > To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to PA-OLD-CHESTER-request@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message