I ran into this introduction to a 1936 article in The American Genealogist by Donald Lines Jacobus which resonates still today, and I thought I'd share it:
"It is a perpetual wonder to the genealogist who works constantly in documentary sources to observe how readily the average avocative interested in tracing his ancestry accepts any statement that may be found in print; and even more, to observe the recklessness with which inexperienced compilers rush into print with positive statements which are actually nothing more certain than guesses based on what they have found in print."
This is certainly relevant to most of us WikiTreers who do most of our genealogy via our computers, trusting what we find "in print" therein. Most of us do not have the resources to do first hand genealogy, sifting through dusty tomes in some town clerk's storage.vault.We must be careful to question the quality of our sources, to try to find multiple different sources (that is, the second source does not rely only on the first source for its data) to support the findings.
Mr. Jacobus's article was written basically to disprove the assumption that Joseph Peck born New Haven was the same Joseph Peck who married in New Haven 25 years later. Sounds likely, doesn't it? Mr. Jacobus goes through extensive research through multiple records to provide a preponderance of evidence to disprove that assumption. Extensive research that most of us can never do.
So we must make our best efforts to emulate Mr. Jacobus, even though we are unable to perform the hands on investigations that he was able to do. In other words, don't leap to conclusions, even those that seem reasonable.
