Question

The peerage website, I have used it as a source on some of my profiles, mainly all the descendants of http://www.thepeerage.com/p3848.htm#i38474

I know the information is fairly good, there could be a few mistakes.  I am sitting at the moment with my mother's notes from nearly 40 years of research, hand typed, family history,  she contributed quite a bit of that information in that email, should I add a note to that effect. The other thing is Daryl does include living family members and as i get closer to the present and use the peerage as a source, living relatives show up.  Should I try to use other sources, and is "as researched by"  a legitimate source.  

Answer 1

I generally prefer to add at least one primary source when using a secondary source like the Peerage or Wikipedia. However, a source is a source - it's just to me it gains a lot more legitimacy when it's covered by a birth/marriage/death record or Census record.

Comments

And as far as "researched by" goes, the problem is that a good, solid source has the capability of being traced back to its origins, so stating that Tommy researched this doesn't hold much validity, unless the reader recognizes who Tommy is and has some sort of confidence in his level or depth of research. It's always better (IMHO) to show where the research came from, and even better than that to show the sources it was drawn from.

I get it that its not always possible to do so - I have some early research that I did where I couldn't begin to tell you where it came from - but ideally you'd like to be able to show how you got that info so that they can follow a similar path to either prove it or follow up to improve upon it.

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I was afraid of that.   I was just trying to be lazy. When my mother started there was no on line sources, she took her  cousins,s  word that great uncle Fred was born, married and died on certain dates. The only other alternative then was to buy very expensive Birth Death and Marriage cerificates and   spend hours at libraries going through old records, and her it was a private family history though she willing shared it around to every family member she could find, I think there is still a very early paper copy filed away in the Victorian Genealogy Society

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You'd be surprised at how easy it is to come up with at least 1 record (if not a dozen) by either using Family Search (a free resource) or Find A Grave (also free) or even Billion Graves (also free). In many cases, someone's been kind enough to provide the research for you, which is wonderful!

Let me know if there's any specific assistance on a particular profile you might like to see as an example and I can give it a try.

Answer 2

All the comments seem sensible.  I know Daryl includes sources for his profiles as he has person pages and sources pages and they are tied together..