Don't be a Click-o-phile...

The Internet is a wonderful thing and it has helped family tree researchers so much in finding their roots.  But there are hidden dangers, and one of the biggest is online trees.

Don’t get me wrong, I use online trees submitted by other people to get ideas where to look for nuts (oops…I mean ancestors), but I use it only to get suggestions.  Sites like ancestry.com, MyHeritage, and others make it very easy to locate another person’s tree and decide the person listed must be your ancestor also.  After all, you recognize some of the names and the locations and dates are close, so it must be your family.  All you have to do is click, and that tree is now part of your tree.  Look at all the work you saved yourself.  You just added 32 new people to your pedigree all in one click!   Look at all the hours you saved – time to kick back with a cupcake and a drink and watch Criminal Minds.

Guess again.  People are not always as dedicated as you are to finding the correct people in your line.  Dates can be wrong, marriages are to different people, locations can be continents off.  If you click and add those errors to your tree, all the work you had done to make it the best it can be is all down the drain.

I have seen trees posted on websites that has the father dying 7 years before his daughter was born.  When I pointed that out to the creator of the tree, I was told that his aunt said those were the dates, so they must be right.  I just found a tree that gave my mother’s death date in 1977.  My mom died in 2010, my dad died in 1977.  What I am wondering is how many people recognized the names in that tree and just clicked – perpetuating the errors.  They add the wrong information to their online tree, and other people find their tree and recognize the names and click to add it to their tree.  See where the problem is?

If you look at the sources of an online tree and find the only sources listed are online trees on the same site, run - don't walk to your nearest research log.  You can use the names, the dates, the locations as research points and see if YOU can verify them before adding them to your tree.  Whatever you do, don’t click and add that information to your tree.  Protect your data, double check everything before adding it and sourcing it with something other than someone else’s work.

But what if all the names and locations are also in your tree?  Isn’t it safe to click and then change any minor errors later?  In my family tree alone there are 27 James Farmers.  All but one was born in Knox and Laurel Counties, Kentucky.  If I see your tree listing James Farmer from Knox County, Kentucky, what are the chances it is the same James Farmer I am looking for?  How can I be sure it isn’t his nephew, cousin, father, son, or uncle?  I can’t unless I take the information it gives and research to confirm or eliminate it.

If you are like me, you have spent hundreds of hours researching your family tree.  You have poured over microfilms, did internet searches until your eyes were blurry, wrote letters and emails to ‘family’ until your fingers were sore.  Don’t get lazy…don’t start clicking other trees to save time…don’t steal someone else’s research.  Keep plugging along one person at a time, do the legwork necessary, honor them enough to tell their story – their true story.

Don’t be a click-o-phile.

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