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PCs and genealogical software are a boon to research. You can access files in a Mormon temple in Salt Lake City, Utah or join a listserv devoted to a surname that you are researching any time of the day or night, any day of the year, all in the comfort of your home. You can exchange information by email and even share your entire family database with the world by uploading a GEDCOM file to LDS.org or worldancestry.com. But this convenience doesn’t come without some caveats.

The data you get o­n the Internet may not be reliable. There may be inaccuracies and omissions in the files sent to the Mormon or ancestry sites. These sites will publish GEDCOMs from anyone and they don’t verify or enforce rules for citation of sources for the data. Not o­nly that, there have been cases of pranksters planting misinformation which is then propagated by other researchers much the way a computer virus is spread. The first lesson then is that you should check citations where available and don’t assume everything you read o­n the Web is gospel—even o­n a religious site like LDS.org!

The second lesson is to get as many sources as possible to reinforce the data. Most genealogy websites and magazines suggest the following types of sources to look for family history:

• Birth, marriage, military, property, and death records
• Census data
• Immigration records
• Bibles, obituaries, funeral cards, and eulogies
• Photo albums and the backs of photos
• Newspaper and magazine articles and books
• Interviews with family members and letters between family members

These all sound like foolproof sources, don’t they? Many are considered primary sources too, so what could be wrong with them?

Bibles contain information about the family from what should be a reliable firsthand source. But sometimes people make errors in recording. After my mother died, I got my hands o­n her bible so that I could copy the information from it. I noticed that she had recorded my first marriage as having occurred in 1966 instead of 1965 and there was no record at all of my second marriage—presumably because she hated my second husband. My maternal grandmother’s bible contained no information at all about o­ne of her sisters with whom she feuded for decades—they both died without ever reconciling. Another thing that can be misleading is when an adoption occurs in a family. It happened in our family more than o­nce when sisters adopted the offspring of their siblings and the names and recorded parents changed.

Lots of families keep funeral cards and obituaries in their bibles too. This information should be reliable, right? The recent funeral of my first husband was an illustration of how many and why inaccuracies and omissions can come from these sources. The funeral card said that Duke would be interred at Draper Cemetery, but after the cards had been printed and distributed the family discovered that there were no plots available at that cemetery and so he was buried in the Jones Cemetery. If no o­ne corrects the funeral card, how will the future reader know; you’d have a hard time finding a headstone for Duke in the Draper Cemetery. The obituary was also very misleading. I believe this was a well-intentioned rewrite of Duke’s history because both he and his second wife wanted each member of their blended family to feel equally important. So while the obituary says he is survived by his 5 children, 2 of them are biological and issue from his first marriage, 1 of them was adopted during his first marriage, and 2 of them are stepchildren issued from his second wife’s first marriage. Whew! That could lead you astray. Duke’s parentage is also incorrectly recorded because Duke’s stepmother is more beloved to him than his own mother; therefore she is mentioned as his surviving parent and although Duke was an o­nly child, the obituary mentions a stepsister and stepbrother as though they were natural siblings and not steps. And lastly, poor math skills can mislead you here—the obituary says that Duke and Linda were married 22 years rather than 19 years. You might very well extrapolate a lot of incorrect data from this obituary.

Interviews with older members of your family can yield a lot of interesting family history. Just remember to take it with a grain of salt and cite the source as obtained in an interview. Sometimes older memories can be failing; sometimes they’re selective. If possible, try to verify with other family members too. Family legends, while colorful, tend to get taller the more they are told. Books and newspaper and magazine articles rely heavily o­n interviews of the subject’s descendants and so they tend to perpetuate the gossip and lore of the family, no matter the veracity.

Photo albums and the backs of photos can be a source of family history. Sometimes, though, the person who writes the captions in the book or o­n the photo may not remember the information if s/he doesn’t record it immediately. Grandmas don’t intend to write the wrong name, they just sometimes confuse the grandchild with the child. Also, older pictures have the date that the picture was developed printed o­n it rather than the date and time stamp that today’s cameras have; this could make you miscalculate someone’s age in a picture.

Some of the public records should be much more reliable. And generally they are, but there can be mistakes in them also. My birth certificate has my mother’s middle name misspelled. Some unwed mothers don’t put their child’s father’s name o­n the birth certificate. Sometimes the child is born before its parents are married and lead the researcher to infer that given a child’s birth date, the marriage date must be 9 months or so prior to that.

My father, Charles Lowe’s, military records show that he lived in Peoria, Illinois, so you would think the whole family lived there at that time. Not so; Charles was living with his Uncle Floyd and his mother lived in Mt. Carmel, Illinois. Ira Lowe, Jr.’s military records have an incorrect birth record because Uncle Red was too young to enter the Navy at the time of World War II when his brother, Chuck, enlisted; so he lied about his age. Death certificates sometimes don’t reveal the condition, which exacerbated the disease that ultimately claimed the life of your ancestor. Death certificates from many years ago had different names for diseases than the o­nes we use today. For instance, tuberculosis used to be called consumption; apoplexy is an older name for stroke. Most people don’t want to reveal that a loved o­ne has died of AIDS, alcoholism, drug overdose, suicide, or murder. That type of information is usually omitted from the obituary and the death certificate may not have enough information to reveal it either.

Okay, so how about census data and immigration records? Have you seen the handwriting and “olde tyme” spelling in the early 1800s? Some of it is very difficult to decipher. They would change the double s to an f or instance, making McKesson look like McKefon. Some of the people in the household couldn’t read or write and didn’t know how to spell their own name or the names of their children, so the census enumerator had to guess at how to spell it. Also, if a child was born and died in the 10-year interim between o­ne census and the next o­ne, there would be no record of it in the census. There are census records available o­nline and for sale o­n CD, but those records got there by way of a person who transcribed the census data from the original handwritten text. If they misread the data or “correct” an antique name for what they may think it should be (e.g., Talitha is changed to Tabitha) then the information becomes corrupted.

As for immigration records, the spelling problem crops here as well. In addition to that, some people Anglicized their names to avoid prejudice in their new home. If you don’t know the port of entry of your immigrant ancestor, you may have to look a long time for them. My husband, Tom’s, family is a good example of that. His grandfather, Daniel McDonald, entered America in New York from Ireland and listed his destination as Montana. Daniel’s brother, Michael was in Montana and was instrumental in getting the miner’s union started in that state. Because of that, Michael was arrested and the family name was smeared because he was blacklisted. Daniel decided to go back to Europe. He went to Scotland and changed his name to McDonnell and when he returned to America, it was with Detroit as his destination. Lots of immigrants made many trips back and forth and brought back other family members with them. So, the immigration records don’t always reflect the entire family situation o­n just o­ne trip.

Property records should aid in our research, and they definitely do. However, we should remember that the names of places could change just as people’s names can. In the early part of America’s history, the original 13 colonies changed names of cities and property lines frequently at the whim of the most recent conqueror. Your ancestor who lived in Kentucky in o­ne census, may show up in Indiana for the next census due to that part of the region being annexed to the other territory and subsequently the state after application for statehood.

We know that our research can yield mistakes—whether deliberate or unintentional or well intentioned. That is why we must be diligent in finding as many sources as we can and verifying what we get from every source as thoroughly as possible, including locating maps for the same region at different times in history. Try to cite each source in your family database so that you can back up what you are recording for other researchers. We will all be better off for the effort.