I’ve been an amateur genealogist since I was a teenager. I started before the internet existed. This was a world where finding a single fact about a not-too-distant ancestor could involve an entire day of hauling huge indexes off shelves, then waiting five days for the certificate to arrive. It was time-consuming and expensive. As I extended lines it became impossible for me to go further as to do so involved trips across the country to churches and local record offices.
Genealogists were quick to take their research online. The early days of the genealogical web were based around usenet and mailing lists, and the ability to trade information and lookups in local records and graveyards made research easier. In the early 2000s I bought a microfiche reader and fiche copies of the records of some villages I was interested in. I could then provide lookups in those records for other researchers. Volunteers transcribed records, and made them available online. We all built websites to share our trees in GEDCOM format, along with the names and places we were researching. I found distant cousins through name lists kept by family history societies and on more than one occasion received a printed out tree in the mail.
Unless you are lucky enough to be connected to an important family, records are pretty thin on the ground. If you are lucky you’ll find a baptism, marriage, and death record from the records of the local Parish church. That might be all the recorded evidence of a person’s time on earth. You’ll discover that a significant portion of your ancestors never bothered to marry, or only did so when showing up to baptise their firstborn. I like to imagine the Vicar looking the young couple with their baby up and down and saying, “Well, while you are both here…” You’ll also discover just how many children died in infancy, how many women died in childbirth, and that people moved around far more than you imagine.
Despite the scarcity of information, in those early days of internet research, most of the genealogists I encountered made their best effort to corroborate information. There’s a lot of guesswork involved, and quite often you have to satisfy yourself that it’s most likely, based on ages and location, that these children belong to this couple. However, we tried, and I still try, to fact check findings, or at least to rule out obvious issues—such as a second family of the same name who could easily lay claim to some of those children!
Then Ancestry happened, and very quickly started to change the face of genealogical research. Backed by an ever growing set of records, and the ability to search the trees of other genealogists, it makes following lines back through multiple generations something you can do in an evening. But it also does something else. You can do genealogy as you always did, but more conveniently, or you can also check out the hints being offered against each individual. These hints can be all kinds of information. Ancestry may have found your individual in a record, such as a census, record of army service, or even a newspaper report. It might also have found your ancestor in another researcher’s public tree. You can look through your hints for each individual, and decide if this actually is the person you are interested in. This checking is the important bit, genealogical data is incredibly messy, Ancestry is good, but it’s also going to surface a lot of information that couldn’t possibly be your ancestor.
It’s in this fact checking that genealogy seems to have changed. As I am presented with another public tree that seems related to me, more often than not I can see a glaring problem with the data. Typically someone in the USA, has accepted a hint that links them to one of my lines in the UK, when I know there was no possible way that the person they have connected to ever travelled to America. At first I would reach out to the connection to explain the problem, typically they just didn’t care, or would argue that their story was more correct. Even genealogy can’t escape post-truth, they believed in their link to England and that was enough.
Ancestry, and other platforms, have actually made fact checking easier, in particular through DNA genealogy. I’ve proved what seemed to be a unlikely link to the tiny Scottish island of Coll due to a effort to match the DNA of descendants. I can say that without doubt I had ancestors there. I’ve also managed to prove that two men, born around 1800 in a small village in Wiltshire were most probably brothers by way of finding a researcher who matched as a distant cousin to me from that connection. It’s fascinating, a new angle on this strange hobby of collecting dead people, helping me prove guesses made over thirty years ago spooling through microfilm in a library somewhere.
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