Is it really important to add sources that support the information posted on profiles?

Question

The WikiTree Help page on Sources says,

"Sources are critically important for genealogy. Some even say that genealogy without sources is mythology. Even if you're just a casual family historian recording modern family history, you will be helping future genealogists by listing where the information you've added came from."

The answer of course is yes, it is important to include sources that support the information posted on profiles.  Members learn this at different points in their genealogy pursuits.

When did you learn sourcing was important?  Was it...

Before joining WikiTree?

When reading the Honor Code?

When a Greeter mentioned it?

When a Mentor mentioned it?

When a Ranger mentioned it?

When you found sources on an existing profile?

While taking the Pre-1700 Quiz?

While studying the Help Index?

While reading posts in G2G?

Just now while reading this G2G post?

Please share your answer, and how you think we can help others see the light sooner.

Thank you!

Comments

I am a Mormon but until I actually see the census record, birth record, etc. I do not take it as fact. The label of ancestry is a red flag. I make sure to see the actual record and citation.

---

Keith - you have just created a great G2G post to point to when someone asks about sources! Thanks!

Answer 1

I heard of sources before WikiTree, I read the word in the honor code, my mentor stressed them repeatedly and provided me links, and it was a frequent topic in G2G... still I did not know.

I realized sources were important when someone else added them to some profiles I managed.  They were able to fill in gaps in the information and correct errors.  The sources made me comfortable with the changes and additions, and more confident in my profile as a whole.  Then it all clicked.  I went back and re-read the Honor Code, studied the Help pages, followed the links my Mentor had provided, etc.  Then I knew :)

Answer 2

I've been at this something like 46 years. I was not meticulous about sources at the beginning, but fortunately learned pretty quickly the first time I found conflicting data. I had to figure out where the first data came from and then compare the two sources, deciding which one I trusted more or deciding to leave both pieces of information.

Back then I came up with a colored pen solution. My old paper files are rainbow colored. Savage's Gen. Dict is in orange pen, Torrey's NE Marriages are in red, etc. I suppose someone from the future might not understand my system, but it got me through until the advent of Genealogy software.

Comments

Thank you Anne :)

Answer 3

I've been doing genealogy for 25 years or so, and I learned almost from the beginning from other genealogists in the family the importance of sources. I don't know how many times I've been given information over the years that turned out to be false when I dug into it and looked for sources. I use several websites and travel to different places with paper documents not online. One of the things that greatly frustrates and aggravates me is that so many of the trees on Ancestry.com have FALSE information about some of my family members (i.e. my great-grandmother's name is wrong and my g-g-grandfather supposedly married a woman that he didn't marry - it was another man by the same name). I don't automatically discount unsourced information, but I do look for sources to support or discount it.

Comments

Thank you Sabrina :)

---

Sabrina, I feel your frustration with the trees on Ancestry.com - I have similar problems with several of my family lines.  Too many people looking for instant family history by copying incorrect family lines from undocumented trees.

---

Exactly, Carolyn! Imagine my 'horror' when checking a second cousin's page where she had added my father and mother with 'all' their children - except ... it was NOT my father or mother, nor was it my siblings!

I emailed her on Ancestry, and received a 'snippy' reply that she has been at this genealogy thing for quite a few years with the help of her daughter, etc.

Well ... I emailed her back with all my family tree information, including her own parents (my first cousins), etc. The person she had in her tree as my father was born in the USA (my father was born in Canada), etc. and, I had the proof/citations, etc.

The documents I provided, etc. cleared up the 'errors' - LOL!

Jeannette

Answer 4

I too have done this for quite awhile.  Learned early on how important it was to record sources - or at least some reference to where the information was found.  This saves hours of re-research time.

I wholeheartedly agree -- put in your sources - don't use "tree information" as a source.  If this is your only source, keep looking -- there has to be at least one somewhere.

Comments

Thank you Sandy :)

---

this is so true. Even when I was just starting out on my family history (only a year or so back), I kept an excercise book and pencil by me and I always wrote down clear references to where I found my info. When you end up with about 14 William Wilkins's or whoever, several of which were born around the same time and several generations of them in one direct line, the rest cousins and second/third cousins etc it's easy to make big input errors if you can't see the sources. I still use an excercise book even now my tree is online and I write down any new leads in there and flesh them out with sources before adding them to the tree. I believe that when you get to the point you realise you are adding to "THE" tree and this is not "your" tree, you should be in the mindset that you are publishing info for others and not just yourself, therefore it needs to be complete and accessible :)

Answer 5

Before I joined WikiTree, sources were spelled differently and were delicious toppings added to a main course.  The only other meaning I knew was where the water in a stream or river came from.

When I joined WikiTree, I saw the mention of sources in tthings like the honor code and G2G, but I thought writing bios was all about the story of someone's life and that it didn't matter where it came from, as long as it was a story.  I didn't think it would ever be possible for me to find out the names of both of my grandfathers, or anything at all about my great-grandparents, since they all came from either Russia or Hungary and that's all I knew.  People were helping me, though, and I started to find out a few things.  It was still very slow going, though.

Then I saw a G2G post asking for volunteers to find information to wrtie bios for people whose bios were totally empty.  I figure that this would give me a start on learning how to do research if I picked one who lived in the United States and more recently than my ancestors ... so I did.  The one I picked had parents, siblings, spouse, and children and I found information about them in the course of my research ... so I just kept on going.  Anne B and Jillaine Smith were wonderful mentors for me - they must have had a good laugh at how naive I was, but they kept encouraging me and correcting me and sometimes finding sources for me when I got stuck.  I ended up learning to research in Germany as I got further back.  I ended up adopting 1,000+ profiles that all came from the same gedcom as my first one and I'm still working on them.

The happy ending is that, after about 6 months on my "adopted" family, I had learned some skills and went back to my family.  With help from a few more members who made some breaktroughs, I have now found all kinds of family that I never knew about.  I finally made my first connection to another profile already on WikiTree about a month ago and was sooooo excited when that happened!  I guess you could say that I now totally hooked on genealogy.

Comments

Thank you Gaile :)

---

LOL - took me a bit, but thanks for the laugh! And the memory. My late husband used to get a kick over how I loved my sauces (still do!) :D

Answer 6

Before joining!

Writing papers in high school taught me not to make assertions I couldn't back up.

However, for some odd reason, it took me months to notice that so many old published genealogies didn't cite their sources. Although I was never an "if it's on the internet, it must be true" person, I was dismayed to discover that I was an "if it's in a non-fiction book, it must be true" person.

A couple of years ago, I realized that a book I relied on contained at least two major errors that affected my direct line. That particular bad info is included in most online genealogies of my family.

I've tried to explain the errors on WikiTree, along with sources, of course, but I wonder what else I'm still taking for granted.

Comments

Thank you Carole :)

Answer 7

Even with working on my family tree since the mid 1970's My main "Source" was my Grandmother.  Most of the other programs I used did not require sources so I did not spend much time looking for them.  A few years ago I got involved with the transcribing of the 1940 census with familysearch.org and the importance of sources came to my attention.  I was moving my information onto the family tree section of familysearch.org and did start adding sources there.  Now that I have moved the information to WikiTree I am continuing to find and add sources but I continue to be amazed at how accurate my Grandmothers information actually was.

Comments

Thank you Dale :)

---

I've found that transcriptions can be dodgy too. I have a forename James in my tree which has been transcribed as Farnes. I have seen the original, digitised record and it is quite obviously James, so even transcribed sources need verifying ideally.

Answer 8

I started my genealogy experience by both collecting stories and at the same time old documents from whomever I could get them. Pretty soon I got a certain reputation in my family: if somebody died, stuff all the old papers in a manila envelope and send them to Helmut. So I did have a lot of letters, birth, marriage, death records, travel papers etc. from the get go. I do have to admit, though, that the farther away from my immediate family I got the more I tended to rely on hear-say, somehow I thought, everybody was doing this based on the documents they could get their hands on, and so did most likely give them more credit than due. I'm still today working on finding sources for some of this information on more distant collateral lines. I only found WikiTree last year, but everything I put there will have sources eventually (still working on it).

Comments

Thank you Helmut :)

Answer 9

I've used sources since before Wikitree. With Gramps, you can link a source, or set of sources, for each fact (i.e. birth, death, marriage, names). In Wikitree, you do the same thing in the biography. My biggest disappointment when I imported to Wikitree was that the sources weren't imported as I expected so I've had to update them by hand. Don't know if that was due to Wikitree import or the way Gramps saves sources to GED files.

Comments

Thank you Peter :)

Answer 10

I learned long before I found WikiTree; almost from the start of my research back in the mid-'90s. Very early on I bought books by Carmack, Croom, & Mills, including Evidence! Citation and Analysis for the Family Historian. So when I traveled to county courthouses, I wrote down volume name, page, & line #'s for every entry I found. Now all I have to figure out is what style to translate the sources into...

Comments

Thank you Kitty :)

Answer 11

Thank you, Keith for your efforts to raise our awareness of this problem. Have always been a firm believer in quality sources as the deciding factor, for adding someone to my tree, but have been very sloppy with recording what those sources were :(   Even though WikiTree has made me aware of the importance, and I've been working diligently to locate and add sources to profiles, it was just recently (after adding hundreds of them) that the light bulb flickered and I realized that many of those still didn't include enough information, that someone could actually find and verify the source - like "1810 census", well census for what location?, and where did I find it? dah!!!!  Often,even I can't find the source again, 10 min after leaving it. So now making another pass through to add actual links (if online), to a better description of where this person is recorded, as a real member of this family. 

The other day, found this gem on Anne B's profile  "Source, source, double check, source some more and let's get rid of all the duplicates."  Making myself a sign to keep near the computer - maybe even plaster it all over the house :D

p.s. just added your opening quote to my greeters message 

Comments

Thank you Patt :)

Answer 12

My mother started our Family Tree, and later we began working on it together. At that point, we took a class on Genealogy 101 at the local library (1989) and I still have the notebook from that class. The teacher was great and stressed keeping a research journal and looking for primary sources.

Even so, since joining WikiTree I have learned more about sourcing and finding good sources. I agree with Anne B. - Source, Source and Source!

Comments

Thank you April :)

Answer 13

My mother-in-law did what everyone ought to do: she wrote down all the stories she had been told as a child about the history of her family. Turns out there was a very good story teller in the family, and most of it was made up. I'm really rather glad that she didn't live long enough to find out. As for me, one of the problems I've struggled with is that I'm curating a lot of genealogical information collated by my grandfather in Germany in the 1930s. I only know the sources very roughly: he described the holiday he took visiting the churches and studying their registers. I don't have the ability to check his facts without repeating the whole original research, and in any case he could read old German manuscripts a lot better than I can. (I don't even know how many of the records have survived.) So I would love to have better source information, but we have to live with what we've got.

Comments

Thank you Michael :)

Answer 14

Ah, sources, those precious documents that proved that many of the stories I heard as a child were.....stories.   Yup, I am not related to the Virginia Lees and all those wonderful stories, but, I am related, somewhat, to Daniel Boone.   Then, I had to stop wearing the Wallace clan plaid, because my family was Wallis from France.   Still, I have found other wonderful stories,  and just what a Heinz 57 American I am...a true melting pot of genes!

Comments

Thank you Robin :)

Answer 15

While I will say I knew and understood the whole sourcing concept prior to WikiTree and had been working on my genealogy as a hobby prior to WikiTree, it wasn't until someone from WikiTree pointed out that I needed to source something that it really hit home. And then, the follow ups started... one profile I hadn't sourced - questions about are you "sure" that's the right person... and the final straw - when I was wrong about a connection and had nothing to back it up and no way to recall how it got there. Not a good place to be. Makes you start to question all your research and to find out how you can be certain that you have at least something to back you up.

So I started sourcing my profiles. Heavily. Or at least as much as I can. I now try not to create any profiles without sources (oops - did one today, but I'll admit, it was a wife and I have excellent sourcing on the husband and it's just a matter of time on the wife...). So I guess it took WikiTree to shine a light on my lack of sourcing to show me how important it was.

Comments

Thank you Scott :)