This is from a handout I wrote (in haste) for a genealogy get-together I attended last night. It may be helpful.
Family history research can be challenging, but most of the time, you’ll find enough resources to be fairly certain of accuracy. Here are some of my best tips.
Always double-check everything, with the oldest resources you can find.
While it’d be great if every family history record online was 100% correct, it’s easy for people to make mistakes.
(In my work, trying to sort the various John Murphys and Mary Kellys can be challenging. Note: The most common Irish surnames are: Murphy, Connor, Walsh, Kelly, Sullivan, Byrne, Ryan, McCarthy, and Doyle. Be very careful with them!)
Fact-check everything at sites like Ancestry.com, etc.
Some researchers are so eager to document their family trees, they copy others’ mistaken notes.
It’s unusual for me to find a 100% accurate family tree at those kinds of websites. They may get every generation but one, correct… and everything after that “oops” mistake is from someone else’s lineage, not their own.
Try to find scans or microfilms of the original documents. Go to the original sources as often as you can.
Some of the most useful are: ships’ passenger lists (for immigrant ancestors), immigration records, military records, census records, church records, city directories (before phonebooks, those books listed people’s names and professions, in address order), and newspapers (for old US newspapers, see https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/ ).
However, remember that all of those were compiled by people, and people sometimes make mistakes.
- If a name confused them, they might write what they thought they heard.
- If no one was at a house when the census taker visited, the census person might ask a neighbor for the information… and it might not be accurate.
- Men sometimes lied about their names or ages on their military records.
Old church records can be very useful.
I’ve found all kinds of great trivia noted in the margins of Catholic and some Protestant church records, if the priest or minister had time on his hands… and a penchant for sharing gossip.
Old photos and correspondence (especially postcards) can be very helpful. Look for notes on them.
And, with photos, scan or photograph them, and then try a Google search of that image, in case someone else – a relative you didn’t know about – has put their research (and photos) online.
I’ll share more tips as time permits. For now, I hope this has been helpful!