How to Stop the Circulation of Bad Family Tree Data

When I first began into geneaology, I was astounded and delighted with the amount of information I found in already-created family trees online.  With the click of a few buttons, someone else's entire gedcom could be integrated with me.  Hundreds - or even thousands of years of ancestry scored in a matter of a few minutes!
Ancestry.com, ftdna.com and other similar genealogy research sites have made it easy to research, publish, share and copy family trees, even if you have zero genealogy research experience.  They have also made it terribly easy to amplify the errors of the inexperienced exponentially.

So, then came the part where I realized most of what I got from others was trash.  I spent days - nay, weeks, weeding out individuals and relationships that were not possible or were not borne out by proof. Amidst all my grumbling and complaining and kicking myself for ever having used them to begin with, I started to see some common threads between the inaccuracies.  I think much of it comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of what constitutes proof versus evidence, some of it is wishful thinking and some of it is just an honest mistake.

Whatever combination of these it is, some "genealogists" leap over impossible hurdles to make connections that are not there.  Mothers give birth to babies posthumously or at the age of two.  Father's father children years after their own death.  Mothers have children a mere two months apart.  Mothers and fathers live to a hundred to give birth to a baby.  There was a king or queen or famous person once, who lived in the same city and they had an unknown child when they were 205 years old who was my 32nd great grandfather.  What?

I have, in my own family, several examples of these myths becoming fact without any real logical foundation. One of them is the myth of Jordanus de Sheppey who is, 90% of the time, mistakenly reported to be the son of King Harold II.

The Norwood line can be traced fairly unerringly back to a man named Jordanus de Sheppey.  The myth in the Norwood clan (in short) is that during his life, Harold Godwinson (King Harold II) had a son who hid away on the Isle of Sheppey and changed his name to Jordanus, becoming Jordanus de Sheppey. There is absolutely nothing in the way of proof tying King Harold to the Norwood family and it is actually mathematically impossible that Harold's son is 'our' Jordanus.  [3]   But despite the story failing basic proof and logic tests, it continues to be propagated - and even argued - mostly because, I think, being related to a king is better than being related to a.... brick wall.

Google-Fu for Geneaology

Google-Fu Master / scott_hampson / CC2.0

Google-Fu : (n) The art and science of crafting google searches to give you precisely what you need.  Example : GoogleFu is strong in you.

If your Google-Fu is strong, the sky is the limit for what you can find online.  I have often found amazing resources with a few tweaks to an otherwise useless search.  Free, electronic resources free for the taking - if only you know how to find them.

First up is Google Advanced Search.  If you use this advanced form, you can do all of what I'll show you in this post without having to type special stuff into the search blanks.  The google advanced search form is a really user friendly form that allows you to search just about anything with easy, user friendly explanations off to the right of each blank.  If you like google advanced search, add it to your bookmarks so that you can get there easily.

Although google is capable of doing a ton of things and you can do all of them from the advanced search form, sometimes it's quicker for me to do google-fu in the generic search blank.  Here are a couple search tricks that are at the top of my list for genealogy searches.

Norwood Books in PDF Download format - Free!

NORWOOD - NORTHWOOD families of KENT WARWICKSHIRE and GLOUCESTERSHIRE / J.G. Dempsey

Happy Saturday!  I found two pretty incredible books on the Norwood line that are in free pdf format that I wanted to share.  Both books are commonly sourced as evidence in family trees and can cost hundreds of dollars in paper form.  So it was great for me to find them in pdf form and to get to read them first hand.

I originally found the titles of the books I wanted here.  (I have tried contacting the owner of the site to thank him but my email bounced - I'd love to find them)

Both books are on familysearch.org, which is the LDS church.  No LDS membership or affiliation is required to get the books though.  To find the books, create an account on the site, sign in, click 'search' and then 'books' and type 'norwood' into the search field.

The two I found on familysearch.org are :
Dempsey, James G. Norwood-Northwood Families of Kent, Warwickshire and Gloucestershire. Cincinnati: The Author, 1983 - which is a really incredible history of the English norwood family from Jordanous all the way down.  Including all sorts of specific evidence.  It is such a fascinating read that I might have read it from cover to cover without stopping.  

The other was : Norwood, William Howard, James Harvey Norwood, Sr, and Henry Offie Norwood. Comp. "General" John Norwood and related lines. x, 424 p. col. coat of arms, ports. 24 cm. Dallas: Trumpet Press, 1964.  - Also a very interesting history of that part of my line that contains some photos.

Online General Genealogy Resources

Old textbooks / SellTextbooks / CC2.0

I've done the majority of my own research online and I've run across some pretty stellar resources in the course of my research. Some are kind of typical but some are maybe not so obvious. Over the next couple of weeks, I will post some family/location specific resources tht I've found helpful. But here are some general resources.

 Internet Archive : Books and Texts Archive - If you're researching something that has become the subject of history, you are likely to find something here. I found a great deal of information around Kent and Sheppey as it relates to the Norwood line.

 Ancestry.com - This site was really indispensable to my research. I think there are lots of arguments for and against sites like this and I can see myself writing a whole post on it at some point. The Cons include the fact that folks share family tree information that is not necessarily reliable or well researched. However, overall, I love the site and where there are lots of members, there are financial resources to obtain and archive genealogy information - power of the masses, if you will. Ancestry.com has an extensive collection of birth, death, social security and census data, among other things. If you join and use their records, I recommend downloading the actual image of the records you use as you go so that you have them to refer back to later.

Google Books - Google books has a ton of books in electronic format. Often, you can only access excerpts of them, depending upon their copyright status. BUT, sometimes, an excerpt is enough.

Familyesearch.org - I really like that they make so many resources available for free. I understand the power behind charging a fee... you then have resources to offer more (hopefully). But the LDS church has resources and has opted to allow free access (without membership to the LDS church) to so many resources and I've found myself grateful so many times for that access.