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Originally Posted by Maximo  We have a couple of family members on both sides of my family who put together books based on their research and a lot of it was wrong, including basics about our current family. Definitely verify through official documents.
We also have the problem of family members who changed names, oral histories, and what not around WWI - WWII because of German connections, and name spelling changes when they came to the US.
We have a bunch of original documents from my dad's family going back to the Netherlands, but the translations from Dutch to English are sketchy. |
Oh - I'll bet that hurt them to find out they'd gotten books done up and it was not right - bet they were mad.
We were both shocked to learn how sketchy a lot of genealogy research is and seemingly involves hasty assumptions, presumptions, surmises, not all that much actual on-the-spot, run-down-the-last-detail, even if travel is required, real fact-checking. Aliases and changing names, changing stories, during the wars, maybe even prison time, etc., really makes the investigation hard to do unless you go to the place the person in question lived to thoroughly research everything available, rake over old records, verify it with other records, old newspapers, talk to the old folks, record keepers, ministers, funeral directors, etc., still alive, look at their family Bibles, Church records, cemetery records, etc. And you can wait on the military to verify something for two years! They don't rush anything. And that's just in this country. Overseas and with language barriers, it gets very expensive and plain old exhausting.