One of the biggest mistakes a person can make in genealogy is becoming a “cut and paste” family historian. I have been guilty of this mistake and here is my story.
I was 18 years old and just starting genealogy work as a bigger hobby in my life. I bought the Ancestry.com monthly subscription and I was off to the races – or so I thought.
I typed in the several ancestors I knew in my ancestry pedigree chart. To my delightful surprise, I started getting those shaky leaves everywhere. With no experience and not much knowledge under my belt, I excitedly thought that all the hints and all of the connections to other Ancestry trees were correct. I became that “genealogist” who copied and pasted, climbing my family tree with no true regard of what I was doing or whether the research other people did was truly correct.
About a year later, after excitement about all these connections to royalty in multiple branches of my tree and even connections to the Native American Pocahontas….. it finally clicked that even though these connections and having these great grandparents would be so exciting, I could not prove what I found because I didn’t do the research! I was just cutting and pasting someone else’s tree to mine. How could I prove all these trees were correct?
This is where my true journey to learning about genealogy began. I started watching videos online and blog posts. The main ones I loved were with Christa Cowan aka The Barefoot Genealogist. I was learning all that I could about the basics of genealogy and how to be a TRUE genealogist where you actually have to do research! – go figure. I created a whole new tree and essentially started a genealogy do-over.
My advice, that will save new family historians a whole lot of wasted time and energy, is to treat others online trees as clues and not as 100% fact. Make sure you verify and look at all the records on that ancestor in that tree. If there are NO records and the only thing that is there for a source is “Ancestry Family Trees”, that means they copied from someone else without verifying and it just creates this huge cycle with so, so many trees with no records or verification. Let’s not do that or be one of those people!
Did you ever make this mistake? Have you ever been a “cut and paste” family historian? What made you realize your error? Let me know in the comment section below!