Did she exist? FindaGrave Value.

Question

I tried to source this profile and came up empty other than knowing where she's not.  It turned out FindaGrave provided the key info.

Lesson:  Do not dismiss FindaGrave just because it's wrong sometimes.  It's always worth taking a look!

Answer 1

I agree.  

I don't know of a site that is 100% accurate.  

And I know the women that connected my family tree on Findagrave worked as hard as we do to have census records/birth records to back up the connections that they made.  And since older census records have so many errors they looked for secondary sources to the census records. When they worked on it, I was amazed by their dedication to the accuracy and integrity of their work.

Comments

You make a good point, Kathryn.  In Mollie's case here, all the info I needed was right on the stone, and it didn't matter what else the memorial said.  If I hadn't looked at FaG, the other records I found, that didn't have Mollie, would leave a lot of doubt.

I'm sure lots of FaG contributors do careful conscientious thorough work, and it's a shame for people to work that hard to have their work dismissed.  But so few of them cite their sources!  Say you find a memorial with no headstone image, or maybe a stone with no middle initial or just the year of birth/death, but the memorial has the full name and day-month-year, and the names of parents, siblings, and children, and lots of other detail with no sources showing.  What good is the extra info?  You have no way to judge its accuracy.  Maybe you shouldn't assume it's wrong, but you have no reason to believe it's correct.  To use the non-burial info to prove anything, you have to repeat the research to find the underlying sources.  If people spent long hours finding census, birth, and marriage records, they wasted their time and yours by not showing them on the memorial.  [Rant over.]