52 Ancestors Week 9: Disaster

From Amy Johnson Crow: Week 9's theme is "Disaster." Our ancestors faced any number of disasters — natural, personal, financial. Perhaps you've had a disaster in your research. How did they (or you) overcome it? (Or maybe they didn't?)

Not your best work, Chris. See me after class.

As you know, I've been working on my genealogy since about 2006. Maybe a bit more if you count me talking to family members when I was a kid. I didn't have a tree. But, I sure did talk everyone's ear off. When it came time to make my tree online, I've made several mistakes. I talked about a few of them last year. Hey. No one's tree is perfect and we've all made disastrous messes of our trees. Looking back, some of them aren't too bad. You can look back and laugh.

Sorry, Hugh. you are NOT the father.

For example,  for the longest time I thought I was connected to a man named Hugh Jones  He was born in England in 1637 and supposedly had a checkered past. Apparently, he was a stowaway on a ship and made his way to the new world. He settled in what is now Salem, Massachusetts and had a very large family from what you can gather from his WikiTree page.

How I got connected to him was a mystery. I was adding people left and right until I saw something that didn't add up. He had this full, beautiful tree on WikiTree and geni. But, something was amiss. He had connections to ALL signers of the Magna Carta. That struck me as a bit odd. So, I ended up asking everyone in the g2g forum about Hugh and whether or not this was true. Long story short it wasn't and a major clean up effort happened on the site.

Meanwhile on my tree on Ancestry, I had Hugh and his full tree on there. Everyone kept telling me that my research was erroneous and that I had so many mistakes in the tree. I was like "Guys, this isn't really that big of a deal." I don't know why they made it such a huge issue. It was not the end of the world and looking back I DO laugh at it. So I had to remove a branch from the tree. It's not a big deal. You learn from your mistake and move on. That's what any good researcher would do. I ended up deleting his branch and left it at that. He wasn't the right father for someone and that was the end of it. Makes sense. Jones is a common last name. It's right up there with Smith.

I did learn a valuable lesson, though. You can't trust everyone's online tree. Some people you can trust provided it is WELL sourced. Some? Not so much. You need to dig for yourself and discover the truth. You can't always rely on everyone. Thankfully, some people have been more than helpful to me in my research.

I'm not really upset that I'm not connected to him. It would have been cool because he was brought up in the infamous Salem Witch trials of 1692. Elizabeth Booth, one of the accusers, claimed that she saw Hugh's ghost and that he said that Elizabeth Proctor killed him when he died in 1688. That was four years before the trials began.

It just goes to show that you need to really do your research when you're going further and further back in time. Sometimes you will find great leads. Other times, you will make mistakes. There is no "if". You will make them! There is a silver lining, though. Even if you make a mistake in your genealogical adventure, you can fix it easily by working on the problem by yourself or with someone. That's what I did and I am all the better for it. I grew as a researcher because of the mistakes I made. Now I know to look at the evidence and see what's really out there. (And knowing is half the battle.)