Dear folks, I am passing extracts from a lettter from another site, because I find the thoughts cited as very applicable, or as a minimum very stimulating, to our research via the web sites. At the risk of not being name specific or county specific, I pass this along for our mutual edification. Note particularly paragraphs 3, 5, and 7. Cheers, DS ===================== > Dear xx, 1. > Thank you for sending us the e-mail with your story about xx. Not having heard from you for a while, I was actually not certain whether you were still doing genealogy. Then came your e-mail, and on top of that, a day or so ago I happened on substantial evidence of your activity. I was searching the internet for something and hit on an archived message from you in the RootsWeb German-Texan mailing list, something from a while back to the effect that you have tons of stuff on the Heusers, Staffels, Elmendorfs etc and was anyone interested? Purely by chance or instinct I went to look at last month’s archive on the same group and discovered that you are the source of approximately every other message! Now of course I’m impressed and moreover am certain that you probably have a great deal of information which I would find interesting. However... 2. > My attention was grabbed by the series of messages entitled “Letters from Gummersbach”. The reason: I am just finishing a first draft of my own transcription, translation and annotation of Eugen Staffel’s letters from his 1873-1875 trip – including about fifteen additional letters which had been separated in the 1950s from the first set of originals translated about 1970 by JM. I have thus far given my draft to only a few people, for comment on specific points, and my initial reaction to your posted messages was consternation that somebody would have sent my draft to you to be put on the internet without first asking me. A second look at your posting clarified that it was not my version but J’s old one. Still, I would like to know who sent them to you, since you described it as “out of the blue.” 3. > In any case, this all got me to thinking. The work I am doing with the family papers has at least three goals: - first, making this very interesting original source material available and accessible; - second, providing context to facilitate understanding of the texts; and third, publishing accurate information which can be substantiated. The first goal requires transcribing the German schrift and translating it into English; by my standard that means printing both the transcribed and the translated texts and would ideally also mean printing facsimiles of the original documents. The second goal involves synthesizing various genealogical and historical/cultural information and presenting it in an efficient form which will enable a present-day reader to read the text with comprehension equivalent to that of the original writer or recipient. - The third goal is important to me because I want work issued under my name to have (and deserve) a reputation for accuracy and credibility. 4. > To be clear, I am not saying that previous translators of the family letters made mistakes, but they often left out the transcription step or else the transcription and translation become separated. The audience is not made up entirely of English-speaking readers; German-speaking readers should be given the original text prior to the introduction of subtle twists through the translation. It’s a different story when one goes beyond mere translating. I’m writing an introduction and annotations in addition to the texts, and unfortunately, some information disseminated in prior articles on the history of this family (even obituaries!) turns out to be wrong. I want to correct misinformation and not perpetuate it. 5. > This brings me to the question of “internet publication.” I’d like to hear your perspective on that topic. My instinctive feeling is to distrust any data for which the only source is somebody’s web page, bulletin board posting or the like. I have gotten leads from such sources, but unless there is a published (i.e. printed) version or an archive as ultimate source I don ’t see how one can trust its credibility. An exception might be if a real person supplies some information by private e-mail, particularly when some corroborating facts are available from ultimate sources. In general, though, I have been warned off by mis-statements and family legends which don’t hold up when documented facts are brought to bear, and even by transcriptions riddled with errors. 6. > An example is the ship’s passenger list showing the arrival of the Staffels in February 1852: some clerk started the string of errors at the outset by writing that Heino Staffel was 83 years old instead of 33 and misspelling his first name, but a transcription posted on the internet by the Immigrant Ships Transcribers Guild compounds the problem by seriously misreading the ship’s name. It looks like you have been given some incorrect information too, since Eugen didn’t marry a Heuser girl during his 1873-75 visit – he married Clara Wahrmund of Fredericksburg – it was his father Heino Staffel who married into the Heuser family, specifically Adeline Wüste, whose mother was the artist Louise Wüste geb. Heuser. Also, the Staffels lived in San Antonio, not Castroville. 7. > It seems only logical that if internet posting is pragmatically viewed as inherently untrustworthy and if one of my chief goals is trustworthiness, I should not want to post my work, especially not before the complete package has been published the oldfashioned, hard-copy way so that a citation is possible. What do you think? > > Sincerely, > xx