The theme for Week 25 is "Fast." I feel the need... the need for speed! (Yeah, the coffee has kicked in.) This theme might make you think of cars or horses, but it could also be an ancestor who didn't take long to find. Don't forget about names like Quick and Race! Have fun with this theme! Click here to check out all of the themes for 2023.
When I think of Genealogy, Fast is not the first thing that comes to mind. Many years ago, an acquaintance made the following statement “I don’t know why you say Genealogy takes so long, last weekend I went to do my family history and I traced it back to the 1700s. I just went online and found my tree.” My response to her was “How do you know it’s correct? Did you verify everything? Other people’s trees can have errors in them? Are you sure it was really your family?”. She gave me a blank puzzled look. You know the deer in the headlights look.
Anyway, Genealogy isn’t fast. You might get lucky and find lots of information on a person you are looking for. You know those “green leaves” from Ancestry. Those hints. I had to remind a genealogy friend, a beginner that those Ancestry green leaves are just hints. They have not been verified; they just match your search criteria. A look of horror came over her face as she said, “I just have been accepting all those hints because I thought they were for my person.”
I have also reminded people that Ancestry trees have not been verified by Ancestry or by any employee of Ancestry. That those trees are only as reliable as the person who is doing the research. I stated that I could put anything in my tree, a TV family, a made-up family, just random records that I attach to people in my tree. I am amazed by how many people never stopped to think about this.
I have gotten some things “Fast” in genealogy. For example, an obituary can provide lots of details about a person, their parents, their spouse, their children, their siblings and in-laws, their grandchildren, and so on. Now usually in an obituary, it just a matter of gathering names and perhaps places where the survivors are currently living or who preceded the person in death. However, with that information, I can usually find more records to expand on the names, birth dates, marriage dates, death dates. But is it fast? Not really, researching the people from an obituary can take me anywhere from an hour to several days.
Have you followed a line through Find A Grave, you know the links to the parents, siblings, children, and so forth. Keep in mind, that those links are only suggestions from other people. Also, those people who create memorials from obituaries of strangers might even have them listed in the wrong cemetery. This happened when my brother died, someone created a Memorial and placed him in the wrong cemetery. A cemetery by the same name, located near the proper cemetery, but still the wrong cemetery. Plus, obituaries might have wrong information because in my mom’s obituary it listed this same brother as Tom when his name was Tim. A typo can really change everything. Even if there is a picture of the stone, the stone could be wrong. My paternal grandfather has the wrong year of birth on his stone. How do I know, because I did research and found out that he was born in 1899 and not 1900. He was born in Aug of 1899 and appears on a census record for April of 1900. His World War I draft card has Aug 1899 written on it. Thus, I know the 1900 date on his gravestone isn't correct.
So basically, I am saying Genealogy isn’t Fast, we might find an ancestor or relative fast, but seriously, was it fast? How long have you been doing genealogy? I might finally get the names of the next generation on a marriage record, but I might have been trying to figure out where and when they really got married to find that record. I have added 100 people to my tree in one day and on other days, only a handful.
Seriously, if Genealogy was Fast, won’t everyone be doing it. I enjoy that it isn’t fast. That it is a big puzzle that I must take my time to make sure every piece fits. It not a race for me or to force the pieces to fit.
Remember to have fun and Just do Genealogy!
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