Like any other type of research, data is critical.  Names, dates, and places are the bedrock that a family tree project is built on.   And there’s a problem with that first statement and I’ll amend it here – Like any other type of research, accurate data is critical.

Pere

There’s a lot of inaccurate data out there masquerading as fact.  You likely won’t have to go very far back to find it either, for me, the first glaring issue was my maternal grandfather.   Here’s what a family tree search for my grandfather, William Edward Humphries, turns up.  What you see here are two separate records of two completely separate family trees.

Some of the information is correct.   He was the son of Frederick Humphries and Alice Rathwell.  He was born on August 6th of 1898 in the district of Algoma and he was married on June 19th, 1923 in the district of Algoma.   That’s all the information that’s correct.

What’s wrong?   First, he was born in Nestorville which was part of Patton County, the town doesn’t really exist anymore.   He was married on the date stated but he was married in Jogues, Ontario and my grandmother’s name was Therese Desrochers.   Lastly, and this is a doozy, he didn’t die in 1927 in Broward, Florida.  He died in 1978 at the General Hospital in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario and I believe my mother has the certificate to prove it.   I know where he’s buried, I go there every June 2nd weather permitting.

So how did it go so wrong?   A couple of ways.  People miss remember facts, people see partial bits of information and assume other parts.   The reason there are two records is simple, someone copied the first as fact.  The moral of the story.  Websites like ancestry.ca or familysearch.org can be tremendous tools but not if you blindly copy other people’s work.  Verify your data.   How do I know for certain that the Broward information is bogus?  I have a baptismal record for my mother, listing my grandfather and my grandmother and it’s dated well after the 1927 death date in that record and it’s located in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario.   I can tell you that he was registered to vote in June of 1968 and that he was listed as retired and residing at 323 Beverley Street (a house he built in the mid 40s and in which he lived until his death).  He appears in another list dating to 1972.

I still look through family trees for information, but I learned a long time ago that it’s best to double and triple check any information given as fact.