Swinging from the Branches of My Family Tree

Eventually I slammed head first into a wall and could go no further. I knew the answers were out there, and short of surrendering to an old-fashioned bus trip, I conceded it was time to select a website and pay a membership fee. I wanted to make sure I was doing this at a time when my interest level was at a peak and I could devote enough time to make it a worthwhile investment. I purchased a three-month subscription at a genealogy site and just as advertised, you don’t need to know what you are looking for, you just need to start looking. I also realized within the first week that I’d be extending my subscription for at least another three months to accomplish all my goals.

Proceed at your own risk, because the flood of information is absolutely staggering. One critical thing to understand is the difference between a fact and a ‘hint’. There is a treasure trove of archival documentation to explore, but the family trees of other people are not facts. They are, in most cases, a work in progress filled with guesses and information passed down from generation to generation. You may be looking at a jumble of information that hasn’t been sorted out yet, temporarily crammed together until the researcher gets back to it. Others have been totally abandoned for any number of reasons. There is a tendency for amateur sleuths (and aren’t we all?) to stumble across something in another person’s file and copy it into their own; the program makes it quite easy to do that. After seeing a dozen or so family trees that contain identical ‘facts’, it may become believable and quite tempting. Do yourself a favor; if you’re genuinely serious about getting it right, prove every piece of information.

Information contained within some published family trees have been spliced together until it becomes utter nonsense. Even a novice like me can see that it’s impossible for a man born in 1709 to be married to woman born in 1590, and yet it’s out there. This ‘fact’ also showed they had children; motherhood at the mature age of 130 years with a husband only 11 years old. Really? I’ve also observed one photograph assigned to several different identities. That being said, there just may be that one hint buried in the midst of it all that will be the key to where you should look next. Repeat after me, “It’s a hint, not a fact!”

You can contact the owners of the family trees through your genealogical account and ask them questions if they are still active members. I wasted hours of time trying to find information regarding Mary Mnu; a name I saw connected with my family sitting in the branches of other family trees. I finally sent a message to someone and confessed that I couldn’t locate the maiden name ‘Mnu’ anywhere. I received a nice response, informing me that ‘Mnu’ means ‘Maiden name unknown’. Oops, a rookie mistake.

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Swinging from the Branches of My Family Tree

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