Viv Carter, Canterbury Branch’s Speakers Secretary, was in the hot seat this evening giving her talk entitled, A Case of Mistaken Identity.
Viv’s subject should be mandatory reading for amateur researchers about the pitfalls of blindly using online trees, and/or online indexes; without backing the data against an original source or at least a reliable secondary one. All in the misguided belief that … “it’s on the internet so it must be correct!” Viv’s case in point was an account of when she tried to put her Grandmother’s tree on Ancestry.
A few years ago Viv took over research from another family member. The research was on her grandmothers side and as an experienced family researcher she set out to check the data she had been given. The original research had some gaps to plug too but eventually Viv was as certain as she could be that she had a correctly researched tree with sources to back it. Before she added it online she checked out other Ancestry trees for this branch of her family. This was when ‘alarm bells’ rang as she found a glaring anomaly in that her grandmother's middle name Elizabeth now appeared to be Caroline. However, all other details, names, dates, places appeared, on first sight, to be the correct family. Except … that ‘her grandmother’ on the online trees appeared to have left Essex to go to Canada to be married? This Viv felt was unlikely since in her childhood she remembered her grandmother living in England!
But as Viv said, growing up she had never heard her grandmother called by her forenames and maybe there was something in her grandmother’s early life that she hadn’t been made aware of? So Viv set out to try to disprove her own research against that shown on the online trees.
Viv lead us through a most thorough investigation in which she showed slides of original sources that provided evidence to prove that her tree was indeed correct. During her research she uncovered several different spellings of her grandmother's family name of KETLEY, some 7 versions, some mis-transcriptions, of the name which made it more difficult to track down the evidence. She even tried to match the ladies to see if they were distantly related with a common ancestors. She says it seemed likely but her research could not pin point it.
Unlike WDYTYA (where evidence just seems to pop up for the researchers with little or no work) Viv's research took many years to carry out. But all her investigations finally proved that Emma Elizabeth and Emma Caroline both nee Ketley, both born in Chelmsford Registration Disrict in 1883, were different people and that it was Emma Elizabeth who was Viv's grandmother and she never went to Canada to be married ... but Emma Caroline did emigrate to Canada and could not have been her grandmother.
Viv’s main concern about the mistakes in the tree was that it had also been posted on a War Memorial site for the husband of Emma Caroline. As Viv was not a direct relative, she knew that her evidence was unlikely to be accepted. So she needed to, and did, contact someone who really was a descendant of Emma Caroline.
Viv's talk highlighted that, when investigating your own family history check that you have enough evidence to prove the links between generations. If, for example, two women of the same name marry different people within a short period of time, make sure you can identify the families of both women. It is also important to track siblings as they can often provide the connections you need.
We were advised that if we found errors on trees posted on Ancestry that we looked at the dates the trees had been posted on the site to find the first person to post that tree. There are often contact details to get in touch with them. In many cases you will note that other later dated trees had just been copied wholesale from the first and posted, including errors, without checking. The same went for photographs, of which Viv found quite a few of her family, and those supposedly hers, during this research.
So the moral of the story is to check other’s research, double check your own research. If possible find a completely different source to confirm your findings. If you are not entirely sure but think it’s a match use question marks or 'possible' etc., anything to indicate to others that you are not completely certain about that area of your research.
But I think if you come across any tree that Viv has researched you can be certain that no stone was left unturned to make it correct. Even then I know Viv would still advise you to ... check the research for yourself.
Report by Tricia Baxter