How I learned what to do with undocumented family trees

Back in the 20th century, my wife's father's mother's family spent a lot of time (and some money on a professional genealogist in North Carolina) trying to find the ancestors of her great-great grandmother Jennie (Cochran) Boren.

They got nowhere; my daughter and I got nowhere too -- until she came across a family tree on Rootsweb's WorldConnect pages, a more static predecessor of today's Ancestry trees. The tree contained names and dates -- no sources. But it approached Jennie from the "other side," that is, her birth family.

Did we sneer at this tree -- unsourced as it was, and connected to an address whose owner never responded to our inquiries? We did not.

But we didn't believe it and take its statements as gospel, either -- we had been around long enough not to do that either.

We did the same as reasonable people do with family stories they heard in person -- checked the claims out against the available records. Was Jennie found in census records with her claimed parents? Were they the ages claimed? What about the siblings and aunts and uncles? Could we find quality sources, information, and evidence that confirmed or denied the claims in the tree?

We did. There's more work to be done on this line but without this rather disreputable-seeming lead, we might still be looking for Jennie (AKA Jane E.).

Wise genealogists use all available clues. Dogmatic rejection of apparently low-quality sources is no more sensible than dogmatic acceptance of them. Don't be a source snob.


Harold Henderson, "How I learned what to do with undocumented family trees," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 17 November 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Cite Your Low-Rent Sources!

Sometimes as genealogists we have trouble distinguishing between our grubbies and our Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes.

Source citations tell our readers what our evidence is. When the work is finished and meant to prove our conclusion, the sources will usually be original records. But when the research is in progress, our best evidence may not be very good. (And some books and articles may simply be created in order to systematize the pile of records and notes found in grandma's attic, and make them accessible, not to prove anything.) They're really more leads to follow up on.

Failing to distinguish these two uses of citations may be a cause of "source snobbery," a disorder in which genealogists (your blogger included) sometimes refrain from perusing Ancestry trees for fear of polluting our minds or our databases. (Of course taking those trees as gospel is an even more widespread disorder among newbies, but we're not worrying about that here.)

Sometimes we need to be polluted in order to become successful -- much as a cop might need a drunken snitch's whisper to get started on a trail, even though it wouldn't count for anything when the case came to court.

My wife's ultra-mysterious great-great grandmother Jennie (Cochran) Boren was born in North Carolina and died in Pittsburgh, but her maiden name was so common we never had any luck finding her in her parents' household. The break we received was not due to our diligence. Somebody who didn't answer emails posted an unsourced tree of Jennie's family from the North Carolina Cochran side, and from that lead we were able to amass plenty of evidence proving the long-lost connection.

Leads document our chase, and later on higher-quality sources document our case, helping us convince our skeptical peers. Don't confuse the two.


Harold Henderson, "Cite Your Low-Rent Sources!," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 11 October 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]