Fact is that most genealogy on the internet is not documented and is therefore highly suspect. I have found many errors in the indexes provided for a fee by the major services. I have made many errors transcribing census records that I put up on my website. The difference is that I correct my errors when I find them. Commercial services do not. A citation guides researchers to the source so they can evaluate the evidence for themselves. Perhaps we ought to emphasize that citations are essential, and not limply accept what is offered for a fee. We should insist that any commercial service provide a scanned image of the record that they have indexed. Census images are easy: NARA microfilms are in wide circulation. Commercial services are charging for tertiary documents and are not even providing images of those. I have several military records obtained from a commercial service that are based on indexes of databases of indexes of genealogical societies. Can you say error boys and girls? I will never again contribute my research to any on-line sharing site. I did that once and several months later, my info has not appeared on the site. It disappeared into the cybervoid of volunteer-managed internet sites. Judging from my Google searching, most of the sites calling for submissions are filled with misleading links to commercial services. I think that if I submit my research to these sites, I am handing my work to a corporation that will make money with my free information that they conned out of me. I could rant on and on about free access to public records that the people paid taxes to the government so that it would keep the records. Instead, I will recommend personal contact researcher to researcher, outside of the corporate-sponsored mailing lists. And INSIST on a citation. Anyone who cannot provide a citation is not a researcher. -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. Version: 7.0.338 / Virus Database: 267.9.4/57 - Release Date: 7/22/2005

At 04:33 AM 7/29/2005 -0400, MJ wrote: >I could rant on and on about free access to public records that the people >paid taxes to the government so that it would keep the records. Instead, I >will recommend personal contact researcher to researcher, outside of the >corporate-sponsored mailing lists. And INSIST on a citation. Anyone who >cannot provide a citation is not a researcher. As the principal author of the SV-CGG's Documentation Guidelines, I too advocate solid documentation, but I would never go so far as to effectively cut off access to the undocumented information that more often than not contains just enough of a hint that can narrow a search for an original source, or that may be a discrepancy that triggers the search for a better source. 100% accuracy is the ideal, but we certainly do not live in an ideal world. Richard Rands

Richard Rands wrote: > At 04:33 AM 7/29/2005 -0400, MJ wrote: > >> I could rant on and on about free access to public records that the >> people >> paid taxes to the government so that it would keep the records. >> Instead, I >> will recommend personal contact researcher to researcher, outside of the >> corporate-sponsored mailing lists. And INSIST on a citation. Anyone who >> cannot provide a citation is not a researcher. > > > As the principal author of the SV-CGG's Documentation Guidelines, I too > advocate solid documentation, but I would never go so far as to > effectively cut off access to the undocumented information that more > often than not contains just enough of a hint that can narrow a search > for an original source, or that may be a discrepancy that triggers the > search for a better source. 100% accuracy is the ideal, but we > certainly do not live in an ideal world. Agreed -- one never knows what the researcher's issue was in not providing documentation ... by definition, there IS documentation because darn few of us would waste the time and effort necessary to make up out of whole cloth a 10 generation pedigree! It's no where near as easy as it sounds. If one's research resources include "Grandmother Lawfull's diary", there's not a lot of POINT to citing it because the number of folks who will have access to it to verify it are vanishingly small, yet Grandmother surely knew when her youngest baby died. Ditto, "Private Communication" which is as it says, private and therefore not subject to verification or refutation. In the case of hard-copy publications, often the cost of publishing it deters the inclusion of sourcing. (See, for instance, my own "The History of the Cresaps, 3rd ed" which covers 12 generations between 1695 and 2000 and is just under 1100 pages with no source citations in sight. I've GOT sources for most of it, but printing a half-line of information and 3 lines of source citation seemed excessive even if it hadn't pushed the book into three volumes.) In the case of on-line publication, the amount of server-space one is willing to pay for, or is allowed free, may contribute to the decision. That Unsourced Cresap History eats up more than 8M of space. Sources are good; data is better. (g) A good researcher can always find supporting documents if he's interested and has data to start with. Cheryl