{"id":14,"date":"2014-04-11T14:33:08","date_gmt":"2014-04-11T13:33:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tenjingenealogy.co.uk\/blog\/?p=14"},"modified":"2017-12-30T01:09:37","modified_gmt":"2017-12-30T01:09:37","slug":"a-single-public-family-tree","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenjingenealogy.co.uk\/blog\/?p=14","title":{"rendered":"A Single Public Family Tree?"},"content":{"rendered":"

A link from genealogyblog.com:<\/p>\n

An Open Letter to Leaders in the Online Family Tree Business<\/a>:<\/p>\n

This letter makes interesting reading. I think the proposal of a single, shared resource for family history is a great idea. Finding information for our trees can be a time-consuming and expensive task, and an especially difficult for those of us working 9-5, or otherwise unable to get to the Record Offices.<\/p>\n

While great in principle, there is a fundamental weakness in the approach: variable data quality.<\/p>\n

\u201cHistory Is Written By The Victors\u201d as the often mis-quoted saying goes. In history, even relatively recent history, there is no such thing as truth<\/em>. All we can ever have is a block of\u00a0evidence<\/em>. Even first-hand reporting can\u2019t be completely relied upon. Eye witnesses subconsciously re-mould their experiences to fit in with their personal beliefs (ref: Eye Witness Testimony – Simply Psychology blog<\/a>)<\/p>\n

In family history we have a similar problem: we often subconsciously re-mould the data we find to fit it into our trees. The excitement of finding a good potential match is sometimes hard to resist. We\u2019ve all done it. We\u2019ve all had a link where enough (or any!) evidence can\u2019t be found, but we just know<\/em>\u00a0that it\u2019s the ancestor we\u2019ve been hunting.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not the same as evidence though, and that\u2019s the problem.<\/p>\n

When I first started out in genealogy I got some great advice from a very experienced genealogist \u00a0called Jean Cole. Jean told me that data doesn\u2019t have value unless it has \u201ctwo supporting pieces of evidence\u201d. (book link – Tracing Your Family Tree<\/a>)<\/p>\n

So, that means for example that a birth certificate alone is not enough to identify an ancestor, you also need some corroborating information. That could be, for example, a census, or a marriage certificate, or even personal testimony in some cases. The point is that none of the data or items of proof stand on their own.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been researching my own family history for over 20 years, on and off. My data has the same quality problems as everyone else\u2019s. Not all of the links I made in those early days have stood the test of further investigation. When I started researching I was a total beginner, I had no skills, but I collected a lot of data. The thing is though, that data stayed on my computer. There simply weren\u2019t any tree sharing sites like Family Search and Ancestry, so those early mistakes were not published.<\/p>\n

Nowadays someone can start their research online, collate a lot of data very quickly, and publish it to the world equally quickly. Other people then take that published tree as \u201cevidence\u201d for their own research.<\/p>\n

If we are going to have a Single Public Family Tree we need to significantly raise the general level of quality in family history research, both in terms of what data is available on-line, and in our assessment and handling of that data.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A link from genealogyblog.com: An Open Letter to Leaders in the Online Family Tree Business: This letter makes interesting reading. I think the proposal of a single, shared resource for family history is a great idea. Finding information for our trees can be a time-consuming and expensive task, and an especially difficult for those of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[4,2],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenjingenealogy.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenjingenealogy.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenjingenealogy.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenjingenealogy.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenjingenealogy.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/tenjingenealogy.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17,"href":"https:\/\/tenjingenealogy.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14\/revisions\/17"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenjingenealogy.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenjingenealogy.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenjingenealogy.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}