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What's Wrong With Genealogy Today?

3/19/2015

12 Comments

 
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There really are TWO answers to that question AND there is a corollary question as well. The genealogy world is changing a bunch and researchers are impacted by these changes, whether they know it or not. So let's dig in and take a quick look at the genealogy world in 2015 and what effect it has on researchers.







Genealogy

For many genealogy researchers. there is not much wrong with the genealogy world today. The average Jane Researcher spends a lot of time online and the amount of databases and records and newspapers available online is growing at a brisk pace.  Not everything is online of course, but the growing number of records is very helpful. So that is GOOD. 

The problem with genealogy today in my view is the abundance of companies (and growing), each with their own user-controlled family trees and increasingly, story and photo databases. And few of them talk to one another and one must keep and update their own data in each of these online trees if one wants to expose their research to as many potential cousins as possible.  And we know that there is a bunch of garbage trees and most likely there will be garbage stories and garbage photos as time goes on. My guess, however is that the quality of the data that users upload is not of much interest to the subscription-based companies, as long as they can obtain new customers and retain the old ones through renewals.

Does this mean that there will be larger and larger One World Trees for each vendor? And if you add photos and stories to the mix, will we have multiple "Geneapedias" of dead people with tons of low quality entries and errors? If so, that is NOT GOOD. I see this becoming a MASSIVE problem in the coming years. Inexperienced researchers will only compound the problem - again NOT GOOD.

Genealogists

What about the corollary question - What's Wrong with Genealogists Today?

For the advanced and very experienced, nothing is wrong. They know what they are doing and they know how to research and what to do with that research. And they know that learning is part of the equation. This is GOOD.

The challenge is for the inexperienced, hobbyists, and newbies. With the culture today pretty much focusing on instant gratification, this flies in the face of prolonged, detailed research.  Even the advertisements focus on "how easy it is" to build a family tree of names. Anyone who has done this for awhile knows that it is not easy. And that conflict between instant gratification and the need for detailed research is NOT GOOD.

Asking others for help is generally a good thing, but my experience with social media and the ease of asking basic questions is generally an easy way out of finding things on one's own.

Are people just lazy, misinformed, undereducated or lazy? Yes I said that twice.

The answer is learning and education. Folks need to learn from others, not have others do their research for them. There is an abundance of books, conferences, and webinars both live and recorded. There are tons of genealogy blogs, where authors share what they have learned, as well as research tips. Genealogy societies have guest lectures and newsletters.

The fact is that there are lots of resources where one can learn to research and become more independent. But the abundance of family history enthusiasts do not take advantage of those resources. This is NOT GOOD.

What is the answer? Simply put:

  1. Invest your time and money in educating yourself. You can learn a lot with just a little money.
  2. Be very wary of data, stories and photos in online tree databases -  use this information as a clue ONLY.

What do you think?

___________________________________

Please Share!


12 Comments
Jane Harris link
3/19/2015 10:00:45 pm

Agree that the level of critical thinking applied to online information is depressingly low in many cases. On the few occasions when I have tried to help someone by pointing out that information in their online tree could not possibly be correct because I had documented evidence that the person in question was married to someone else and in another country on those dates, the response has been lukewarm to say the least. And no corrections made. The development of online information can also make family history research a rather solitary pursuit where the individual loses the learning opportunities that membership of a family history society, for example, could have brought. Probably no coincidence that FHS membership is generally in decline (UK anyway).

Reply
Marina Dececo
3/20/2015 01:52:15 am

I've been researching my family and the families of others for about 18 years, but I know I don't know everything, and always try to catch one or two webinars each week. I also read a number of blogs I love learning more about family research. When we stop learning, we stop growing.

Reply
Jennifer Geraghty-Gorman
3/20/2015 04:04:20 am

Kenneth,

Thank you for your insight, and your emphasis on the importance of education, and ongoing learning.

In my opinion it speaks to another problem which negatively impacts the genealogy/family history community, and that is, so called experts who seemingly possess little or limited expertise.

Often I receive emails from research beginners asking me for help because they have been taken down the wrong path by some webinar, or online group or business. While these professionals may be well intentioned, some of them clearly lack knowledge.

As a professional historian of Irish history, I find it especially disappointing to see 'experts' sharing Irish history that is completely incorrect -- giving inaccurate information, wrong dates, wrong places, etc.

Most recently, I heard from a beginner 'Jane' who attended a learning session on Facebook during which the 'experts' directed her, and other participants looking for baptism records, to the free Irish government website -- irishgenealogy.ie. In fact, Jane didn't have a chance of finding the records for which she is searching on that site because currently it has records for a very limited area of Ireland.

The site clearly lists the areas of Ireland it covers -- Carlow, Cork & Ross, Dublin and Kerry -- and the parish in which Jane needs to search is not among them, but the experts insisted that was the best place for her to look.

Given that they could have directed their participants to another site that may have actually been of some use to them, it made me wonder if the whole point of the 'learning session' was to simply market their own business.

With apologies for my very long comment.
Cheers, Jennifer

Reply
Catriona Casey
3/25/2015 08:37:57 pm

Hi Jennifer, really interesting comment. I saw those posts on that expert session. I would feel it is not so much a lack of knowledge as a hidden agenda. The 'experts' didn't want to direct the users to RootsIreland, a competing subscription based website, which has the most extensive database of church and other genealogical records for the vast majority of the counties of Ireland.

Reply
Marina Dececo
3/20/2015 04:48:08 am

Well, you can't believe everything you read or see on the Internet......or.....everything you hear:-)

Reply
Dawn
3/20/2015 11:04:28 am

So very true. There are so many mistakes on lots of online trees and people are just copying across mistakes. That is not research it's name collecting.

Reply
Lois link
3/22/2015 05:52:31 pm

I agree that these sites are making it too easy for incorrect information to be copied and then spread out over the internet.

One of the worst things i think is the "merge" option, where a record can be found and linked directly to your tree. At least if you have to search yourself, you are more likely to pay closer attention to the record to determine if it for the same person as the one in your tree.

Reply
Bob
3/24/2015 03:12:31 am

Copying someone's shoddy research perpetuates someone else shoddy research. I did it the old way and it wasn't expensive but very time-consuming. But it was factually correct. If you really want to get to the facts be wary of people with thousands of names in their tree.

Reply
Beverly Woodrufd
3/25/2015 01:26:10 pm

I have been doing my research for about 12 years. I found so much wrong information online, so I quickly learned the importance of not trusting other people's "research". I did use the Internet to help me and it has been an invaluable tool in locating where to obtain original documents and generally point me in the right direction. I have found persistence pays off and trips to different libraries is helpful. After ten years of research, I had great documentation on my side of the family. Now I am workin on my husband's side, which has presented some problems in finding documentation. I refuse to take the easy way out since the major organizations do not recognize family trees without correct documentation.

Reply
Marian
3/26/2015 04:07:57 am

It's unfortunate that the internet has made it so easy to perpetuate errors, but I suppose that the same complain was made when photocopiers became commonplace. We need to keep looking for the presence of citations and the content of them.

Reply
Dawn B
3/26/2015 05:08:56 am

I agree greatly with this blog about mistakes and population of the mistakes. I use a private tree on all the internet for gathering information from others. Then I do the most important step PROOF and that is what is missing from genealogy today. The proofing of the information you have gathered. My online tree is a mess but it is private that way when I post something on a public tree I know with documented proofing that it is correct.

Reply
Claire
1/16/2016 11:14:22 am

You say that there are ways to become better educated and to find records relatively inexpensively. Where does one start?

Reply



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