Question:
Which of these sources are reliable in a search for information on ancestors?
?
2013-11-17 11:18:38 UTC
U S Social Security Death Index
Obituaries in local newspapers
State Or County birth records Online
State or County Death records online
State or county Marriage records online
Find a Grave Memorials
Ancestry.com Family Trees
FamilySearch.org
rootsweb WorldConnect
U S Federal Census records
State census records
Geni
Six answers:
wanderlust
2013-11-19 07:19:02 UTC
No genealogical or family history source is 100% reliable.



The originals of official records (e.g. photographic images of the actual handwritten birth, marriage and death records, census records etc, whether these are on the state government site or on a commercial family history site like Ancestry or FamilySearch) are the most reliable records. But even they are not always 100% accurate. People lie in census returns all the time (e.g. they may claim a live-in lover is their wife or pretend to be younger than they are). They sometimes lie in official birth/marriage/death certificates (e.g. although this is in the British records, not the US ones, one of my relations lied about her daughter's birth date when registering her birth, probably because she was late registering the birth and wanted to avoid a fine.) And mistakes can be made, either by the family member or by the registrar (e.g. a child registering their parent's death may not actually know their exact age or place of birth and may provide inaccurate details e.g.2 a registrar may mishear what the family member says and write down the wrong information).



Transcriptions of original records (e.g. those on Find A Grave and those records on Family Search where you have no chance to view the original image) provide further opportunities for mistakes to creep in (e.g. transcription errors, where the person/computer copying the record misreads the handwriting and types Brown instead of Brain etc, and ) and ideally you should only use them as a guide and check against the original document when you can. If the original document is held in a foreign country or distant state and has not been uploaded onto the 'net, though, sometimes a transcription is the best you can get hold of for the moment. You should really only consider it provisional information, rather than reliably proved information, though. Transcriptions on a reputable site, staffed by experienced genealogists, are usually more trustworthy than ones on private websites or on user-submitted websites like FindAGrave where anyone can contribute content without any quality control.



Obituaries, being contemporary sources, have some merit, but are only as reliable as the person who provided the newspaper with the info - the daughter of the deceased may think her father was born in Lackawanna County, but as this happened 20+ years before she was born, she wasn't there to witness it and may be wrong about that. They are not as reliable as official records and, in addition, often contain typos and other editorial errors which can really mislead you.



Generally the least reliable sources (in fact, I wouldn't call them sources at all) are user-uploaded family trees on Ancestry.com, Rootsweb World Connect and other such websites. Many amateur genealogists make mistakes in their research and some of the trees I've seen on these sites are works of pure fiction.



That's not to say they don't have their uses - if I think I've found a match with my tree and the submitter looks to be an experienced genealogist who knows what they're doing, I will often PM them and suggest we share information and sources. Often they've found records I haven't and vice versa and sometimes a seemingly unsolvable mystery can be cracked by pooling resources and using two heads instead of one. But I will never take information in a user-submitted tree on trust and will always go back to the original sources they've used and check them myself. I never simply copy and paste information from other people's trees.



It's usually best to use as many sources as you can, so you get as complete a picture as possible. None of the sources you've listed are actually bad, with the possible exception of user-submitted family trees which, like I said, are not a source.



The other issue is people using sources badly - a common mistake which many amateur genealogists make (and which I made myself when I first started out) is to assume that if an ancestor called Adelaide Jeffs was married in one town, and there was also an Adelaide Jeffs of about the same age born or baptised in that town, then they must be one and the same person. But people move about and don't necessarily get married in the same church/town/county/state as they were baptised/born. You can make this mistake even if the sources you are using are original records and 100% reliable. Your research technique is an even more important factor for the accuracy of your research than what sources you are using.
Observer
2013-11-18 09:31:58 UTC
U S Social Security Death Index, US Federal Census, State Census, Obituaries in local newspapers

State Or County birth records Online - only indexes onliine, State or County Death records online only indexes onliine, State or county Marriage records online only indexes onliine and Find a Grave Memorials are reasonable reliable, but unless you are holding a certified copy of a document you do not have "evidence" of an event.

The remaining "sources" you cite are actually sites on line that provide genealogical information and no sources. Ancestry is the largest COMMERCIAL site and has purchased many many other sites and the information that was on them. Ancestry has records transcribed overseas and many of them are transcribed incorrectly because the people transcribing do not speak or read English and have little to no training on how handwriting is transcribed.Familysearch.org is teh LDS site and teh records are transcribed by volunteers and are double checked before being uploaded, the transcriptions are better. The Genealogies however include the old LDS records that were not documented and I have personally found many errors in them regarding the people I have researched. Rootsweb, and Geni are similar to the other commercial sites . I use the National Societies standard for documentation and may have 20 or more sources including probate, land and civil court records, or any other document that was generated by the person I am researching or an action of that person. I use newspaper articles as well as local histories to enrich the family stories and to add to the documentation.

When it comes to reliability, your research is only as reliable are you make it, it is not about a single source or even all the sources you mentioned. It is reliable when you as a researcher are satisfied that your research is correct and anyone looking at it can follow you reasoning process through the documents you cite as your sources.

Genealogy is not a matter of clicking on a few specific websites, it is searching and documenting and sometimes disproving something can be as important as proving it.
?
2017-01-20 10:16:09 UTC
1
Maxi
2013-11-17 14:44:14 UTC
PRIMARY records which are the REAL record or image of the real record which was written at the time or close to the time of the event are reliable resources only and several of them which you cross reference to make sure you are getting a complete 'picture' of the correct information.........



Any index is human made a long time after the event



Online on ANY website ONLY when it is an actual image of the primary record .........nothing else



Census returns are secondary records, the only thing primary about a census is that it was taen on a certain date every so many years......... information varies according to who gave it



Geni /and family trees are never reliable resources anyone who uses them are not researching but copying poor uncited informtion



Memorials are poor secondary and online are not even that unless there is a photograph of the stone



All you mention can be useful but only if you know how to research and prove your ancestry.............
Nothingusefullearnedinschool
2013-11-17 12:44:01 UTC
If you mean 100% reliable, none of them.



I will start with the Census. A Census merely lists who was living at what address once every 10 years (in the U.S.) If you search for a name only, there is no way of knowing if that person is an ancestor or not, or even a relative.



Ditto with the S.S.D.I. You have to know the person's particulars or you are merely matching a name.



Findagrave.com, etc., are fueled by volunteer info; I myself have added a few gravesites. Since there is no check, a mistake or even intentional false info will not be caught unless someone comes up with the correct info.



All genealogy websites obtain their info from libraries, historical/genealogical societies, newspaper archives, etc. And user-submitted trees. (That includes www.farmilysearch.org, one of the best.)



All of the city, county, state, federal records are kept by humans. Records from centuries ago are far more accurate that records kept in computer files; people back then took pride in their work, and, let's face it, if you have to spend hours recording the info (name, dates, places) you want to make certain it is correct. It is quick and easy to type the info into the computer, hard to catch errors.



Also, with the spell-checkers built in to many programs, errors are created by the computer. It wants to change names to what it thinks they should be.



So, go for records first, then use the Census, Findagrave.com S.S.D.I., and other such sites/records for reinforcement.



Family Search is one of the best, but they do have user-submitted material. User-submitted material is usually accurate, but some merely copy what they find some place and submit it as their own.



So, best to have at least 3 sources for every ancestor to even come close to accurate.
anonymous
2013-11-17 16:45:23 UTC
All, and none. Death records, for instance; if someone was adopted when he was two, there's a pretty good chance his death record will have his adopted parents, not his real ones.



Ancestry.com family trees are the worst, in my experience, followed by RWWC. I used to demonstrate how flawed it was when I gave a course in on-line genealogy at the library. You can find 30,000+ white people in it "born" in Ohio before it was settled by white people.



I find mistakes in roughly 5% of the census entries I read, not counting parents' birth places; those are off at least 25% of the time.


This content was originally posted on Y! Answers, a Q&A website that shut down in 2021.
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