Are LDS records reliable?

Question

I posted a message on (Hicks-27) It cites that Edward Winslow had a daughter named Margaret. Gives her Birth date and where she was born and her fathers name. Some has said he did not have a daughter named Margaret. And some have said Lds records are hog wash. So what is the truth?

Comments

Are you asking about trees or records?

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Records.

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The record that Teresa shared was a member-submitted family group sheet, submitted to the LDS in the mid 20th century.  It listed a couple of wills as sources, neither of which supported the parents of the immigrant claimed on the sheet.

What a number of us have been trying to help Teresa understand is the distinction of types of sources and what elements of a source support (or not) the claims made on it.

We have also compiled a "genealogy" or history of the various sources that demonstrates where and how certain claims about the ancestry of the immigrant have changed over the years, and where the information is supported by original records and where it is not.

The ancestry of this particular immigrant is one of the most challenging I've seen with errors introduced as early as 1791 and possibly even much earlier.  And unsubstantiated claims continued to be introduced through the 19th and into the 20th centuries.

Answer 1

The digitized records are quite good.  Still one must remember that the information on the written record is only as good as the person writing it.  I have done a lot of indexing for Family Search. I'm a good indexer but I make mistakes.  You must look at the image of anything indexed.  It is imperative because the transcription will not give the rules it was transcribed under and they differ from project to project.

That said, the trees tend to give you clues but they are just internet trees and the amount of unsourced hog wash is amazing.  I've had people connected to my family with sources just because the name was similar.  No one apparently bothered to see that New York City and Cincinnati, Ohio are not the same nor that the same-named person lived in a different century.  I've also had people added to my family as dead (including my living parents) just because they are old.  Do not use Ancestry trees, Family Search trees or internet trees as sources.

Comments

Just want to second this. Always look at the original record and don't just look at the index. Also, since mistakes are made, it is sometimes worth reading through the digitized film Then there are all the films digitized but not indexed yet.

Answer 2

LDS trees can be as bad a Ancestry trees. (My dad is listed twice with a brother, Case, who was attached for who knows why. Similarly of name, I suppose.) It all depends on the sources!

Comments

We have now established that Teresa was asking about records, not trees.

Answer 3

Two of my mother's sisters joined the Mormon church when they were teenagers. Genealogy is imperative for them, but they are no more perfect than the rest of us. :)

The genealogy that my oldest Aunt did is pervasive on the internet, especially RootsWeb, FamilySearch and Ancestry, which is all based on her LDS family research. So, of course, it's been copied, over and over, onto other sites.

As I build on their research, as with doing the same with anyone else, Mormon or not, I prove, disprove and find new information.

I have two cousins that actively work on family genealogy for the church. Just like collaborating with anyone else, we have to work together and share information and properly document our sources.

One thing that we can be thankful for, and depend on, is the shear number of records that the LDS church has digitized (available on Ancestry and Family Search), and made available to the rest of us on the internet and in their Family Research Centers! :)

Answer 4

Most of their records are accurate, unlike family trees,

Answer 5

Lds records are good if they give proof.So many of there records are

from Family Tree"S.Often you can prove the record yourself.

Comments

They clearly distinguish which records are from trees and which are not just as Ancestry does and when doing record searches they don't include trees at all, just records.

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Yes they are solid if you can look at the image first to confirm the transcription is accurate - those where you can not see the original to me are kind of iffy - but I would trust those over a say Find A Grave or anyones unsourced tree

Answer 6

Genealogy is a work in process that never stops. Very little is absolute, but I found LDS records to be of great assistance.

Answer 7

It goes like this.  The writers of old family history books often invented connections.  Immigrants with the same surname wre routinely made to be brothers, or father and son, when there was no evidence to connect them at all.

If they found a rich person with the same name in England, that was the immigrant.  Loads of immigrants were once placed as Lords and Ladies, who weren't.  Failing that, they looked for a baptism in the same name, and that was the immigrant, although there could be many baptisms in the same name in the same year.  Failing that, they found a family with the same surname and said the immigrant "undoubtedly" came from that family, and made some excuse for the baptism being missing.

For maiden names of wives, they just filled in any surname connected with the family, eg as a neighbour or witness.

This junk-genealogy all went into print, but usually small print runs for family circulation only.

But later, the LDS collected copies of all the books for the big library.

The LDS also encouraged members to submit copies of all the birth and marriage records they found in their research.  That was fine, so long as the members stuck to the records they found in parish registers.

But the members also found the old books in the library and turned the "information" in the books into "birth records" and "marriage records" and submitted them as well.  And so the made-up stuff was all mixed in with the records.

LDS members do genealogy for religious reasons.  Getting it right isn't important.  Some of the members do it very badly.  But the LDS treats it all the same.  It's not aiming to police genealogical standards, it's aiming to encourage the religious activities of its members.  It has, in the past, suppressed data from registers in favour of member contributions, because that's the way it thinks.